The next time you get jealous of your friends' Facebook photos of their perfect holidays, remember that sometimes things aren't exactly as they seem. Especially in a world with Photoshop.

Dutch student Zilla van den Born used this to her advantage when she told her family and friends that she was going on a five-week holiday to South-East Asia.

Over the course of the next 42 days, she regularly posted photos of her travels to Facebook - pics of her at the beach, eating exotic food, sitting next to a Buddhist monk in a temple.

It all looked like what you would expect from that kind of holiday except for one problem - she never left Amsterdam.

Zilla, 25, visited a temple and restaurants in Amsterdam, she went snorkelling in the pool in her apartment complex - and for everything else, there was Photoshop.

And her family and friends had no idea she had never even left the Netherlands.

Find out how she pulled it off in this video:

Zilla spoke to media in the Netherlands and explained that the charade was actually part of a university project -she studies graphics.

“I did this to show people that we filter and manipulate what we show on social media, and that we create an online world which reality can no longer meet," said Zilla.

“My goal was to prove how common and easy it is to distort reality. Everybody knows that pictures of models are manipulated. But we often overlook the fact that we manipulate reality also in our own lives.”

Something to keep in mind the next time you get envious of people's online lives.

Pics: Zilla van den Born