After British actress, writer and mom blogger Tova Leigh shared a seemingly perfect selfie to talk about beauty standards, she received praise for her appearance, and then made the image her Facebook profile photo. Later, she admits she felt guilty over it, so she posted a new one — one that better captures the making of such a “sexy” look.

“Today I am sharing the ‘behind the scenes’ of that image. How I actually looked when it was taken, without 20 attempts to get it right, without cropping out the bits I don’t like and without adding the ‘make me look pretty’ filter,” Leigh wrote on Facebook.

“You see, over in the weekend I read an article about how more and more people are feeling depressed and insecure because of all the images of ‘perfect’ looking people on social media, which they perceive to be real,” she wrote.

While “perfect” looking images tend to fill our Facebook and Instagram feeds, Leigh acknowledges that that’s often far from the truth.

“The point I was trying to make is that what you see on social media is not always reality,” she told Scary Mommy. “Humans tend to share the good stuff and I guess that’s very natural, but I think the young people who look at social media need to know that life and what is real is much more beautiful than any airbrushed image with filters applied then they see on social media.”

And she didn’t stop there: “Let me tell you something: THIS IS REAL,” she wrote. “In all my mum-tum, cellulitis, granny pants and absolutely zero thigh gap glory! Not the perfect sexy body by some dictated standard, but imperfectly fabulous because it is real and it is mine.”

“If you look at social media you will see that 99 percent of images look perfect. But how does that even make sense? Life is not perfect. We are not perfect,” she told Huffington Post. “And that was the point I was trying to get across: We’re not perfect but that is totally OK. Being real is far more powerful than being perfect.”

PREACH.

[h/t Scary Mommy]