The digital age is a very scary period of time.

You do not know if the person you meet online is who they claim to be, or if they even exists at all.

For example, Exhibit A:

What a surprise

A couple of photos showing a cool, young, Japanese female rider have gone viral on social media site Twitter recently, but not for the reason you think (well, to be fair, it is for the reason you think, but also, not really).

She goes by the handle @azusagakuyuki on Twitter, and she tweets pictures of herself with her machine pretty frequently on her account.

She has almost 18,000 fans on Twitter, and we totally understand why people would follow her: she's pretty, she's cool and she's a biker chick.

This is how she looks like:



Such a lovely young biker girl, right?

Now, before you start unzipping your pants having naughty thoughts, this is how she actually looks like:


Pretty shocking, right?

Wait, what?

Yup, the cool young biker chick you saw in the pictures above is actually an old Japanese man who used an app to turn himself into a sweet young thing.

His cover was blown when some eagle-eyed fans spotted a reflection of a man on a side mirror in one of the photos posted by @azusagakuyuki, and they started getting suspicious as the person behind the camera did not look one bit like the girl in the photos:


Japanese media soon picked up on the story after it became quite a big deal.

Not long after that, producers of a Japanese variety show managed to track the real rider down and it turns out that she is actually a 50-year-old Japanese man with luscious hair.



The man confessed to using FaceApp, a photo editing app that allows users to apply filters to their photos, to turn himself into a pretty girl.

He reportedly told interviewers that he resorted to using the app to turn himself into a "beautiful woman" so that his photos would be popular, as no one wants to see photos of an old uncle on a sports bike.

He added that he finds the 'beautifying' process enjoyable, and he loves that the fact that his photos are so well-received on social media.

Talking about doing it for the 'gram, right?



Well, this is a good lesson for us to not trust everything we see on social media.

BRB, we need to go bleach our eyes for a little bit.