They
threatened
tokillme
andmycats
WORDS BY SWNS IMAGES: SWNS / @ANDREEACRISTINA / ALAMY
R
ushing home from my job
in finance, I opened my
laptop and started typing.
Writing about my new
favourite face scrub, I
attached a snap – and within
minutes, sent my post to the world.
Streams of positive comments
flooded in.
I’d been running a blog on
Tumblr since I’d been a teenager...
At first, I’d share my favourite
recipes – from nutritious salads to
low-calorie treats.
But when I started to post about
different skincare and beauty
products and treatments, my
audience went wild.
When I was younger, my
grandma Valerie, 70, taught me the
importance of a decent scrub and
cleanser, and said to always use a
night cream.
‘Make sure you take your
make-up off thoroughly,’ she’d
said, wagging her finger at me.
Now I was teachingothersthelessons I’d learnt from her.
As my readership on
Tumblr grew, I was ready
to take on different social
media platforms.
And when Instagram
came along in October
2010, I knew it was the one
for me.
At first, I just had a
personal account, sharing
snaps of camping trips
with my friends or
glamorous sunshine shots
on the beach.
Then my cats Mushball
and Peeny Houdini
became an Instagram
sensation, totting up
50,000 followers!
Desperately wanting
to share my beauty
advice with fellow Instagr
started a new account...
Andreea Cristina’s Beauty Blog.
Using Peeny’s account and
specific hashtags with my posts, as
well as teaming up with other
beauty bloggers to promote each
other, my audience was growing
each and every day.
Soon, I had thousands of
followers on there.
Love your page. Can’t wait to try
this new product...
The comments came in thick and
fast under my photos.
As the years went on and my
followers grew from thousands to
hundreds of thousands, I quit my
job in finance and became a
full-time beauty blogger.
I got more comments than ever –
though not all of them good...
More than 400 nasty comments
flooded in every week.
Most of them were from men.
You’re a whore... Get a real
job... Gold-digger... Worthlessfemale...to mentiona few.
Some messages were sexual.
People even threatened to kill me- and my cats.
I didn’t understand why men
were following me anyway – it was
a beauty blog aimed at women.
Yet every insult felt like a dagger,
and I started to question whether
they were right.
I became anxious
and obsessed with
every derogatory
word that was said.
Lying awake at
night, staring at the
wall, I found that the
comments consumed
my every thought and
nightmares.
I’d spend evenings in tears,
scrolling through the monstrous
messages, blocking trolls.
Yet the abuse kept coming.
Shutting down my account for a
few months in 2014, it gave me
somebreathingspacefrom
the horrible trolls.
But my beauty blog had become
my career, with advertisers paying
me to review their products.
I needed to post regular photos to
earn a living.
I had no choice but to sign back in
and build a thick skin against the
awful, relentless trolls.
In June 2015, I
started receiving
e-mails from a man I
didn’t know.
Hi, How are you?
Can we talk? The
e-mails read.
How did he get my
email address? I was
completely baffled.
I blocked him, hoping that would
be the end of it.
But, then, he somehow managed
to find every single email address
I’d ever owned – even an old
university one. At first, I hit theBloggerAndreea
Bolbea,
30, from Vegas, receives
more than 400 nasty
comments every week...
I started off
sharing my cats
with the worldHUNTED BY
My audience grew,
but so did the
nasty messages