Sorry to be bad news, but there’s a new app you need to know about. Advertised as “anti-Instagram”, BeReal is currently a free № 1 app on the US App Store. It promises, slightly irritatingly, “a new and unique way to find out who your friends really are in their daily lives.”
Photo: Courtesy of Nilufar Haidari
It works by sending an amber push notification to all of its users at once – one that includes two panicky yellow warning emojis and a message that it’s “BeReal time.” Upon receiving this message, everyone uploads a photo of what they are doing at the moment, whether they are accidentally dancing in a club with their friends or sitting alone on their couch and staring at the wall.
It also takes a snapshot of both your front and rear cameras at the same time, which explains why this app is mostly used by teenagers and not by those of us who have matured in multiple chins. Most importantly, you can’t see BeReal on anyone else until you post your own.
The app has grown faster than its French founders, Alexis Barayat – who previously worked at GoPro – and Kevin Perot, who expected it when they created it in 2020, with many users complaining that the only one allowed every day photo uploaded forever.
After setting up my account in the app, I am shown possible friends of mine who are already there, as they are more real than me. These include two friends from university who don’t use Instagram, a cool girl on whose couch I stayed in New York in 2014, a cool girl on the couch where I’m currently staying in Los Angeles, my editor and a boy with which Many years ago I had a disastrous romantic relationship in Denmark. I add them all, with the obvious exception. The app also allows you to see posts by strangers in the Discovery section, and most users appear to be teenagers.
The key ethos of BeReal is authenticity. The lack of filters and a sense of urgency are meant to remove any notions of curation or fabrication, words that have seemingly been tainted by Instagram and its shiny influencers. You can’t even see what the front camera captures to help you at least choose a flat angle.
“I didn’t want to post a picture of myself from under my chin the first morning.” Photo: Courtesy of Nilufar Haidari
My first BeReal was a slightly meta photo of me watching TV reflected in the mirror. My friend Tom, who is in Turin and is doing his PhD, posted a photo of himself and his partner making asparagus for dinner. My editor posted a picture of a fish in an aquarium and his best presentation of the said fish. When I reached the end of my “show” with these three publications, I clicked back to the “discovery” section – which represents many strangers in everyday life: someone is cooking ramen; someone sitting at a London train station; a blond woman on a Illinois couch watching baseball and drinking wine with a pile of freshly wrapped presents on the floor; a young man in Brazil stuck in traffic; five teenage girls hanging in a green staircase; many children do their homework in their bedrooms. He manages to achieve his goal of being gloomy, but why would anyone want an app that doesn’t inspire him?
The application takes snapshots from the front and rear cameras of your phone. Photo: Courtesy of Nilufar Haidari
It’s annoying that during the one-week duration of this experiment, my BeReal notice disappeared sometime between 4 a.m. and 7 p.m. The app moaned that it was “posting late”, although it still allowed me to post, somewhat beating BeReal’s stated goal. I once offered him a picture of my morning coffee, but I aimed the front camera at the ceiling fan because I didn’t want to post a picture of myself from under my chin in the morning. The app patronizingly told me “your friends prefer when they can see your face!”, Which I should disagree with.
Personally, I did not feel that these prosaic images represented my daily life at all. In my mind, my life is entirely palm trees, outlined against the backdrop of beautiful sunsets and hummingbirds that drink from the colors and the feeling of the sun on my skin – these are the things I post on Instagram. Life can be both authentic and beautiful, and pretending that “real” life is always ugly and trivial seems like a miserist’s way of understanding the world. My Instagram output can be selected, not created in hostage-like circumstances, but in the end it seems more authentic than a photo of my forehead and a half-eaten salad.
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