A model who decided to shed a little transparency on her beauty regime has lost thousands of Instagram followers in the process.

Twenty-four-year-old Stina Sanders from Bristol decided to unfilter her grooming diary for a week – no lies, no filters, no gimmicks – in a trailblazing attempt to empower women miffed by the apparently perfect world of a beauty blogger.

“I wanted to see what would happen if I stopped posting glamorous photos, and shared stuff that you wouldn’t normally even share with your friends,” Sanders told People.com, “Stuff that was taboo, stuff that was quite crude, all that kind of stuff.”

"Thought I'd post you a photo before my pedi!", wrote Sanders. "My toe nails are falling off, I have swollen ankles and disfigured toes."

And so Sanders began her seven-day beauty feed. The model started with a Monday morning snap featuring her top lip hair removal ritual (we salute you), and then a photo of her runner’s feet with chipped nail polish (been there, run that).

The brave blogger also uploaded a pretty bad selfie taken too quickly from THE most unflattering angle below her chin (you too?), a trip to the psychotherapist, a post about her IBS, and a happy snappy whereby she admitted she was on her second cup of coffee sans shower, all without having brushed her teeth - shock horror! Not.

"Oh the IBS is bad! So it's colonic irrigation time....."

All perfectly normal stuff in a week’s work of beauty grooming right? Something that women would and could relate to right?

Well yes, and no. In the reality check process, Sanders reported that she lost over 3,000 followers in a week. “I thought that my followers would remain the same but I would get no likes, but the total opposite happened. I have had an influx of likes, but I had a massive decrease of followers,” said Sanders, whose Instagram numbers plummeted down from 13,000 to 10,000 in less than a week.

Sanders doesn’t think that her project has been in vain however - far from it. In light of fashion blogger Essena O’Neill who recently garnered attention by revealing that her perfect bikini-clad Instagram feed was one big fat – or rather slimmed-down – lie, Sanders thinks that it’s time for a social media reality check. “Personally I think that Instagram is so fake – the amount of filters, the airbrushing – so I thought it would be interesting,” she says.

As its name suggests, ‘social’ media should be about engagement, about a conversation right? Which is why Sanders thinks she’s struck a chord with women in need of an unfiltered approach to sharing. “Women were commenting because they could relate,” she explains. “For example on the hair removal cream photo of mine, one girl said ‘I do my morning maintenance every Monday too.’ People were pleased that they could actually see it’s okay to be normal.” And as for the selfie (without filters) taken at her psychotherapist’s clinic, “that had most likes out of all them.”

Sanders's most liked unfiltered Instagram upload

As Sanders says, “Who cares how your hair’s looking? Just be happy in yourself and be confident when you look in the mirror. It’s so important to just be real.” We like that.

At the time of writing this, just a day after her project had been completed, her Instagram account had reached 29,000 followers.