A new Instagram challenge has thousands of teens posting dramatic videos of themselves 'looking ugly'
Words by Madison Malone Kircher, Business Insider
The latest social media challenge has teens smearing their faces with makeup in the name of body-positivity — but the videos are actually just insulting.
The hashtag #DontJudgeChallenge was trending on Instagram earlier Monday where there are over 85,000 thousand posts using the hashtag.
The challenge was also trending on Twitter under the misspelled hashtag #DontJudgeChallange, Mirror reported.
To participate, teens are filming themselves looking "unattractive" and then revealing what they actually look like in real life.
For the purposes of the challenge, being unattractive involves putting on glasses, messing up one's hair, and using makeup to create uni-brows, fake acne, and stained teeth.
Many of the teens also sport smeared lipstick that looks more like an imitation of YouTube star 'Miranda Sings', rather than an actual attempt to combat the trolling and shaming that has become a hallmark of social-media.
Many of the videos feature popular music in the background and were created using video-editing app Musical.ly, which is where the challenge appears to have originated. We've reached out to Musical.ly for comment about the bizarre social-media movement but haven't heard back yet.
Some Twitter users are calling out the obvious flaws in the challenge, noting that while it purportedly aims to stop body-shaming, #DontJudgeChallenge only continues to reinforce existing beauty stereotypes.
The #DontJudgeChallenge is not the first time people have united over a social-media challenge. For example, the 2014 Ice Bucket Challenge connected people all over the world in the fight against ALS and more recently, the 'Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge' had thousands of people seriously bruising their faces in an attempt to look like the teenage celebrity.
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