A model who lost thousands of followers after posting a series of #superreal images on Instagram has spoken out about her experience.

Speaking to People, model Stina Sanders explained, "I wanted to see what would actually happen if I stopped posting glamorous photos and shared stuff that you wouldn't normally even share with your friends, stuff that is taboo, stuff that was quite crude."

The 24-year-old model spent a week documenting her very real beauty regime (without the usual filters), which included snaps of her hair removal routine, her toenails falling off (due to running), a post about IBS and a trip to the psychotherapist. In stark contrast with what we are usually met with on our Insta feeds, Stina went out to put something very real on Instagram, rather than the picture-perfect bikini selfies we are used to.

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You would think that adding a little bit of truth to the social media platform would have been met with a positive response from women. Rather than lowering our self esteem and feeling like we can't compete with these other worldly images of perfection, Stina's snaps should have made her female followers feel inspired. However, instead, many simply unfollowed her. 5,000 of them in fact.

"During the experiment I lost 3,000 followers and come the end, I had lost 5,000. I was shocked because I actually thought it would be the likes that would dramatically reduce and not the followers."

While some of Stina's 13,000 followers admired her honesty and interacted with her posts, many did not appreciate her experiment and simply removed her from their news feeds. Shocking isn't it?

This comes just a few weeks after blogger Essena O'Neill dramatically quit Instagram after reposting a number of her own snaps with captions explaining just how unnatural the images actually were and how false Instagram is.

Stina was clearly in agreement explaining, "Personally I think Instagram is so fake – the amount of filters, the airbrushing – so I thought it would be interesting." The model has said she will continue to put forward a much more realistic depiction of life on her Instagram and we can only hope that others follow suit.

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