Alix Earle Admits to Posting Facetune Fail: ‘It Was So Obviously Fake’

On her latest podcast episode, the content creator revealed early mishaps with the editing app.

Alix Earle / Dave Benett/Getty Images

Even content creator Alix Earle needs to take breaks from social media from time to time. In the latest episode of her podcast, Hot Mess with Alix Earle, she acknowledged that she has been “unplugging a little bit recently.” For her, social media breaks serve as a mental health boost.

But the pressures of her job certainly make it harder to do so. Because she has built such an open and honest brand on social media—one that really took off after she started sharing unfiltered photos of her skin and acne—she finds it difficult to step away from at times. If she doesn’t post in “real-time,” she admitted in the episode, Earle starts to feel “inauthentic” to her audience.

And that’s exactly what her audience appreciates: authenticity. Earle has built a platform on the basis of sharing unfiltered outtakes from her life—the good, the bad and the acne. But, as she revealed on the latest episode of Hot Mess, even she has gotten caught up in the social media game before. By that, we mean that Earle had a phase when Facetune played a role in her online presence.

According to the TikTok star, she first discovered the editing app in the summer before eighth grade. At the time, she thought she was one of the few people aware of the app. She thought she could manipulate her photos and “no one would know this is fake,” she remarked. There is one edited photo, in particular, that sticks out in Earle’s mind. Though she can no longer find it, she vividly recalls a swimwear snap in which her body was obviously edited.

As a middle schooler, she didn’t realize that other people would recognize that she had manipulated it. She didn’t realize that other people knew about Facetune. Now she admits that the photo “was so obviously fake,” but she didn’t understand that at the time—until her sister Ashtin pointed it out.

Now, years later, her approach is vastly different. Though she shares more of her life—and herself—on social media these days, she is now dedicated to authenticity. “I do try now ... to not touch any of my photos,” she revealed on the podcast, “especially now that I like to post my skin and everything.”

Earle found fame through authenticity. The SI Swimsuit inaugural digital cover star has no intentions of returning to her younger ways, and we (and her followers) appreciate that.