Meet the proud freaks of Instagram

Hannah Rose Dalton recently posted an image to Instagram of herself in a pink outfit. But this wasn’t some Barbie princess fantasy. Instead she wore a draped wrap jacket over a feathered skirt, 15-inch-tall platform boots without heels that gave her the appearance of levitating, and a neck brace.

A design resembling barbed wire or lightning bolts ran from her cheek along the side of her bald, conical head; there was a smooth patch where her nose should be, and her eyes were a blank sea of putrid yellow. The caption read, “Gurl bye.”

Together Bhaskaran and Dalton post under the name Fecal Matter, broadcasting their unnerving interpretation of beauty to almost 300,000 followers. Taking up to five hours to assemble, it’s a vision influenced heavily by horror films, Japanese manga cartoons and science fiction: a stark departure from the typical Insta-fare of designer clothes and beauty products.

“We’re not trying to be an influencer,” Bhaskaran, 24, said during a recent phone call from London. “We’re not trying to follow the rules. The rules were not made for us. Instead of trying to reach a standard that’s not going to happen, we want to have fun and create what we want to create.”

Tired of banal and homogeneous standards of beauty, some social-media users have begun exploring aesthetic territory once thought of as underground, alternative or even ominous, and they’re exposing it to the mainstream.

Accounts like Salvia, Hungry and Aunt Petunias Friendz are also marrying the macabre and the glamorous. They have antecedents in the work of Alexander McQueen, 1990s club kids, Cindy Sherman (currently posting eerie self-portraits on her own Instagram account) and Lady Gaga.

As artificial intelligence and automation threaten the job market, is it so strange that some would like to dress up as robots? With the looming threat of ecological disaster, what’s the harm in using make-up to explore life as a post-human mutant?