A 32-year-old Instagram star and blogger faked a trip to Disneyland to prove an important point about deception on social media

• 32-year-old Carolyn Stritch is a freelance photographer and lifestyle blogger behind The Slow Traveler.
• She conducted an experiment in which she attempts to show people how easy it is to fake 'perfection' on Instagram.
• She used heavily filtered selfies and Photoshopped her '22-year-old perfect self' on a trip to Disneyland.

"Question everything," is Instagram influencer and blogger Carolyn Stritch's latest message to her followers. And to encourage people to do just that, she conducted an experiment to show people just  how easy it is to fake "perfection" on the photo sharing platform.

Stritch, who is from the UK, is the 32-year-old lifestyle blogger and freelance photographer behind The Slow Traveler. She has amassed a 190,000-strong following on her Instagram account @theslowtraveler through sharing perfectly poised photos of cosy-looking settings involving copious cups of coffee and stacks of books, like the one below, which been liked more than 50,ooo times.

But, as we should all know by now, not everything is always as it seems on Instagram.

In a post entitled "Why I hacked my own Instagram account," Stritch reveals how she fooled people into believing she'd taken a trip to Disneyland with a series of photos.

The story was inspired by a selfie she took with face transformation tool FaceApp, after which Stritch said she was shocked by how much it changed her face.

"[M]y face changes quickly and dramatically, fine lines flatten, wrinkles smooth out, blemishes unblemish, dark circles disappear, cheekbones rise, eyes brighten, lips get bigger, nose gets smaller," she wrote.

"My face is gone. Staring back at me, wearing my clothes, sitting in my bed, is a stranger. Or, perhaps more accurately: it's my perfect self."

She posted the selfie to Facebook and says that no one questioned the enhanced image, not even her own family.

"I came up with a story: my FaceApped perfect self, who's ten years younger than I am, flies off to Disneyland for the day, and somehow manages to photograph herself all alone in front of Sleeping Beauty's Castle.

"I manipulated images, captioned them with a fictional narrative, and presented them as real-life."

The caption on her first post above read: "Tomorrow, I'm going to be 22! I'm treating myself with a trip to Californ-I-ay: I'm off to Disneyland to Instagram the hell out of Sleeping Beauty's Castle.

"I'll be putting myself to bed nice and early tonight: I'm flying tomorrow and coming home Monday (need a magic carpet, not an aeroplane). I'll be by myself, but so what? It'll be my very own fairytale. Human possibilities vastly exceed our imagination!"

Next, she posted: "I've taken myself off to California. There I am in front of Sleeping Beauty's Castle - my crazy, self-indulgent 22nd birthday present to myself. Tomorrow I'll be back home and it'll be like it never even happened! I keep saying to myself: it's kind of fun to do the impossible. Life is what you make it!"

Stritch says that she doesn't usually use filters like FaceApp, but admits she does make the odd tweak in a nod to the "aspirational" side of the photo sharing platform.

She also admits that despite what her account might suggest, she never reads books by her window. "Those windows, beautiful as they are, make my flat freezing cold," she asaid.

She continued: "Sometimes that coffee cup I'm holding is empty. I suck in my stomach. I rearrange the furniture. I photoshop out dirty marks made by bashing furniture off the walls."

She added that with this project, she crossed a line, "went way, way over it so I could work backwards and figure out how far I can reasonably go and still make work that's both responsible and good."

Stritch says she's using the project as research for her photography degree.