Last night, the notorious bleached babe threw his army of loyal Beliebers into turmoil when he posted an image of an unidentified girl (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Russian supermodel Irina Shayk) with the caption "OMG who is this!" OMG indeed, Biebs, OMG indeed. A slew of Cinderella wannabes subsequently took to Instagram and Twitter pertaining to be the pouty beauty but none seemed to quite match up.
At this point we’d like to point out Justin, that if you re-grammed the picture from her account, which to all intents and purposes it would seem you did, then, umm, probably best to Google her name, which is written clearly at the top of her account: Cindy Kimberly. Or direct message her. But whatever, we're getting distracted, obviously the pressing issue is that Bieber has the hots for this girl and he called on his fans to help track her down. We can only presume she’s now currently on some private jet somewhere over the Atlantic being flown to Biebs HQ.
Cindy’s Instagram account reveals very little about herself, and crucially, her age is unknown. There's some excellent fan art that’s worth a gander, the fact that she has her own YouTube channel, and a cool 109K followers. The image Justin posted of Cindy didn’t fare too badly either, attracting more than 700,000 likes within the space of a few hours. Fans – we mean critics – are undecided as to whether the post was a response to growing rumours that his ex Selena Gomez and Niall cheeky-chappy Horan are now loved up.
Bieber’s call to arms is an example of a growing trend for Instagram to be used as a model and personality agency. V-Files cast their last NYFW show entirely from the social media platform and London’s cult model bookers, Anti-Agency, frequently use the platform to headhunt new faces. As the Essena O’Neill furore proved last month however, the rise and rise of the Insta-celebrity is a growing cultural phenomenon – one that focuses excessively on the physical appearance of women and one that, if left unmonitored, can be extremely problematic.