Dutch artist Zilla van den Born recently posted pictures of her vacation in Southeast Asia on her Facebook account.
However, what her Facebook friends didn't know was that she never left her house in Amsterdam and just Photoshopped the photos she uploaded, Independent reported.
According to the artist, she did this to prove a point in a social experiment. Van den Born said people on social media sites are usually very careful about what they post on their accounts. They do this in order to maintain the illusion that they are living an exciting and interesting life.
"I did this to show people that we filter and manipulate what we show on social media - we create an ideal world online which reality can no longer meet," she said.
Before she started with the experiment, she told her friends and family that she was going on a vacation in Southeast Asia for about five weeks. They even accompanied her to the airport.
But once she was alone, she took a train back home and spent the duration of her fake vacation editing photos.
In the album she uploaded, the photos showed the artist eating Thai food, sitting beside a monk in a Buddhist temple and snorkeling in crystal-clear waters. As convincing as they may seem, all the pictures were fake and have been edited by Van den Born, according to Yahoo.
She even decorated her room to look like a hotel in Southeast Asia every time she spoke to her parents through Skype.
Van den Born's social experiment was meant to point out how people inadvertently choose the type of reality they show to the people around them, Tech Times reported.
"My goal was to prove how common and easy it is for people to distort reality," she said. "Everyone knows that pictures of models are manipulated, but often overlook the fact that we manipulate reality also in our own lives."