Case study - how do people react to "am I pretty?"

Dear readers,

Hello! 

This post is about something that has concerned me over the past few days and I decided to share it with you.

There is an app for iPhones and iPads called "Tips". It has a section that they call "help out".  This section was obviously designed for people to ask questions about makeup, fashion or whatever but lately people have been using it to ask the question "am I pretty" or "which selfie?" Or "who is the prettiest?" You get the idea. I have two opinions on this 1) Yes it is a little annoying and selfish to ask about themselves but 2) we have no idea what these people are going through and maybe they just need some reassurance! So, with these two ideas I decided to do a test on the help out section in tips to see how people respond to my "am I pretty?" post.  Just to say this is completely and utterly just an experiment and I am perfectly secure about my looks and don't have any problems at all.

I decided that this was a problem because of the comments that I have seen on other people's "am i pretty" posts, many of them deleted now because so many people have said they were wrong. I will post a few below:

^^^ this has a point! Only logical response I saw!  But the same girl posts the following comment on someone else's: 

The ones I really wanted to show you have been deleted because they not nice messages.

So, here are the responses to my first post:

So I got lots of nice responses, thing is I wanted a range of responses, so, I carried out a couple more experiments.

1) I changed my question from "I'm feeling insecure at the moment etc" to "am I pretty" so that the question appeared more in-your-face, blunt and more impatient.

Unfortunately, this didn't have much effect... People just ignored the post.

2) I then decided to post some older pictures because they're really bad photos

I got some more suggestive responses such as "God made everyone beautiful in their own special way" but all comments were kind, friendly and sweet.

So, contrary to my hypothesis, people aren't actually horrible!  

Answer to this? Don't post pictures of yourself online asking people if you're pretty because although you don't know them and they will tell you the truth, it can get irritating and sometimes the truth isn't a nice thing to hear.  Ask your friends or someone you know to tell you the honest truth, if they're true friends they will help you! As will I, comment below if you have any problems xxx

Ellie xx