BeReal is willing to bet that your real, authentic self — zits, raccoon eyes, flyaways and all — is a lot more interesting than you think.
, a French photo-sharing app with a mind-numbing valuation of $600 million, is a combination of Instagram stories and Snapchat, joining the ephemerality of the latter with the mundaneness of the former.
Given these myriad limitations on what you can post, one would think BeReal would be a massive flop, a venture relegated to the margins of tech startup history like Yo or Cuddlr or Whisper or Lulu. Yet it has flourished among an audience of zillennials exhausted by the hyper-FaceTuned aesthetics of their Instagram feeds. “There’s a spontaneity about it which takes the edge off,” says Joey Gingold, 28, a product manager at a parametric insurance firm.
The fact sheet the company provided to me when I reached out for this story includes the following rather dramatic pronouncement: “Warning! Be-Real will challenge your creativity. BeReal is life, real life, and this life is without filters.” Since downloading the app a few weeks ago, I have not achieved similar moments of Zen clarity; mostly, using the app has served as a reminder to me of how truly boring my everyday existence is. What it did do, however, was serve as a reminder to me that other people’s lives are just as dull and non-photogenic as my own.
Because I am somewhat outside what I assume is BeReal’s target demo of terminally jaded, wide-leg-pants-wearing zoomers, I only have about six or seven friends on the app, but all of them were posting pretty much the same type of content I was: goofy, unposed midwork selfies; day trips to museum exhibits; and the occasional road-trip vista shot or two.