If every action has an equal and opposite reaction, then every perfectly staged Instagram photo must have a mess lurking just out of frame. For a long time, we had to conjure these messes using only our imaginations and a bit of Schadenfreude. Maybe the coiffed mother of the angelic toddler was struggling with potty training or psoriasis. Maybe the fitness influencer broadcasting her daily six-mile run had a private pastry addiction. Whatever the secret, it didn’t need to be spelled out. We, the users, needed only to exercise an iota of empathy or logic to understand that behind every life style was, of course, a complicated life.

Lately, though, the messiness of real life has crept out of our imaginations, charging into the foreground of social media. Celebrities have always used their social-media accounts as confessional booths, but at some point in the past year Instagram stars began interrupting their otherwise aspirational feeds with a very specific type of revelation—posts that could be described as the “getting real” moments. For many beauty and fashion personalities, the “getting real” moment is about mental health and well-being. An exemplar of the form came in late 2018, from the French street-style icon and fashion blogger Garance Doré. “These last years have been bumpy to say the least,” she wrote in a caption. The text, sombre and unusually long, sat below a no-makeup photo of Doré, perched outdoors in hiking clothes, looking pensive. “What’s funny is that when I look back, I started these years in the mirage of the fashion girl, living the ‘high life’ (dumb expression). Truth is, after a few years of exploring that world, I became miserable and I felt very far from myself.”

The post was an early sign of the times. Instagram, once a platform where life experiences could be reduced to a beautiful snapshot and a catchy phrase, began to feel more like LiveJournal. Captions grew longer, and read more like personal essays. Some were highly specific and heavy, others vague and lighthearted. “Confession, I am not always body positive. Just like you all, sometimes I find myself on low days not loving what I look like,” the plus-size beauty influencer Hayet Rida wrote in a post. (The caption also announced a new partnership with L’Occitane.) “Sometimes I am filter obsessed too, but I am learning that it is all part of the process.” Subgenres flourished: we began to see side-by-side comparisons of staged photos and their outtakes, cleverly tagged “Instagram vs. reality.” Even the owner of a beloved rescue dog began to open up about the dog’s unruliness, reminding fans that pet ownership is not as easy as she had made it out to be. Struggle and candor became aspirational, even fun.

The “getting real” moment is so prevalent that there’s a new podcast, “The Lowlight Reel,” that attempts to celebrate unfiltered moments or points of personal struggle. The show’s host, Embry Roberts, invites entertainers, writers, and influencers to discuss “the stuff you didn’t see on social media”—which includes eating disorders, anxiety medication, impostor syndrome, and health scares. The irony, of course, is that this is now the stuff that you do see on social media. The shift is not just a spiritual awakening but an aesthetic one. In an Atlantic piece, the writer Taylor Lorenz explored the drift from highly manicured photos—a neatly cropped image of your avocado toast, say—toward deliberately sloppy ones. “In fact, many teens are going out of their way to make their photos look worse,” Lorenz wrote. The original Instagram tropes have grown dull, creating a hunger for authenticity, or at least the appearance of candor.

“Getting real” posts vary widely in their substance, but their tone is meant to signal a moment of catharsis. I have been living a lie, the Instagrammers explain, as if their followers had been naive enough to take prior posts at face value. At their best, these posts offer moments of relief to the follower—not to mention a voyeuristic jolt. But there is plenty of deception, if not delusion, in them, too. Most of them sidestep the inconvenient fact that distress is an occupational hazard of life online. Although Instagram has been well documented as one of the most demoralizing places on the Internet, it’s easier to post about insecurity and isolation as if they flowed solely from external factors, rather than from the powerful, consuming platform by which many of these people make their livelihood. Indeed, at their worst, such posts pull the same trick as aspirational content: they leverage insecurity for profit. Instagram is still an ad-driven marketplace, and influencers, after posting a “getting real” moment, will often follow up by thanking fans for their support and commiseration—or announce, like Rida, a new brand partnership.

And yet there’s more to the “getting real” post than salesmanship. Tavi Gevinson, the actress, writer, and former editor of Rookie, recently wrote an essay, in New York magazine, about how her Instagram persona was never as honest as it appeared. The more striking passages dissected Gevinson’s own reaction to her feed. “When I review posts . . . I almost envy my own life as though it were someone else’s,” she wrote of one phase of her Instagram life. “Then I mentally fill it out with everything that happened off camera. Here’s my friend and me dancing at a fashion party in very tiny outfits; today, we no longer speak. . . . Here’s me posing at the Met Ball; I sent my therapist an email declaring my spiritual crisis from inside the after-party bathroom.” The piece revealed the stakes of presentation; we see how a polished persona can not only conceal but cause dissociation, detachment, and a sense of regret.

But influencers were given their name for a reason: their value lies in their ability to subtly shift the tastes, desires, and behaviors of the people watching them. People feel compelled to do what they’ve observed others doing, which is why the spike in self-revelation has happened all at once. In her essay, Gevinson writes that she was invited to Instagram headquarters, where she was given insights that were both heartening and frightening. “Aspirational photos did better a few years ago, but now users crave posts that seem to be behind-the-scenes, candid,” she wrote. (“Seem” being the operative word.) Research by marketing companies confirms this trend; the consensus is that, at least on Instagram, the art of influencing is now about “relatability.” But what made Gevinson’s essay so compelling was that she admits to having always tried to be relatable—and, in her analysis, that effort had only twisted her into deeper knots of deception. “Getting real,” it turned out, was not a corrective. It was another ruse, designed to appeal to an audience, and used to brush aside the mess.