Beauty you’re born with, but brains you earn.
– Jay Kristoff, Australian author
The 16th President of the USA, Abraham Lincoln, once said, “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
How true this is. For a long time, a popular Chinese vlogger known as “Your Highness Qiao Biluo” projected herself as a young, long-haired woman to thousands of her fans.
Then, suddenly a technical glitch during one of her livestreams recently revealed that she had been using a face filter.
At one point when the filter faded, the “cute goddess” adored by her fans was gone and in her place was an unrecognisable older woman.
Before the incident, fans had been urging the vlogger to remove her filter and show her real face. She countered by saying she would only do so if fans sent her higher donations.
“I can’t show my face until I receive gifts worth 100,000 yuan. After all, I’m a good-looking host,” she replied. So donations began pouring in.
Before the technical glitch, Qiao Biluo, 58, had attracted 130,000 followers as a gaming personality on Douyu, a Chinese live-streaming platform that enables viewers to donate money to streamers, without even showing their faces.
She had uploaded pictures onto the site using face-editing apps. She did not notice the technical glitch while she was online until followers began leaving a paid VIP room in droves.
Actually, there was nothing wrong with her face. She was not disfigured and looked quite decent. She just did not look like a “cute goddess”.
Despite the glitch, the vlogger has not suffered any setbacks other than being called Granny. It is said she now has over 650,000 subscribers and the numbers are growing!
Qiao Biluo’s story serves as a lesson to all netizens, that is, don’t believe everything you read or see online.
Why was there a need for the vlogger to use face-editing apps? Maybe, just for fun initially and see how many people she could trick?
In my opinion, all technological inventions such as the face-editing apps are good. It is their abuse by opportunists that make us view them with wariness.
A picture, they say, tells a thousand words. Many people in the world including Malaysia have fallen victims to internet love scams after looking at pictures of handsome men and women online.
A typical case begins when a woman meets a guy online. He claims he is from abroad and his picture looks good.
After he says all the right things, she imagines he is everything she dreams about.
Even though she hasn’t seen him in real life, she has already fallen head over heels for him.
Her nightmare starts after he tells her he loves her and that he will meet her.
Suddenly, she gets a call from the authorities informing her that he has been detained while entering the country and that a big sum of money is required to set him free.
Desperate to help him, she keeps transferring money to a bank account as instructed until she is left with nothing.
After that, there is silence and she wonder what is happening to the man she loves.
According to The Star, this is typically what happens to victims of love scam syndicates.
Even though such cases are highlighted regularly by the media, many people continue to fall victims to love scams.
If you had to choose between beauty, wealth or brain, which would it be? This question was posed once on an online question-and-answer-site, Quora.
One of the replies which came back was as follows:
“With brain, you essentially have wealth. Play your cards right and you’ll have good wealth. Look at some of the richest people — Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc. All geniuses beyond doubt.
“On the other hand, wealth can bring/create beauty. Wealth can give you good resources to self-improvement. Plastic surgery, specialised diets, good exercise programmes, the lot.
“Why choose only one when you could have all?”
Now, what would your answer be if the question was posed to you, my dear friends? Would it be beauty or wealth or brain?
