This woman wrote an open letter to Instagram because she was tired of seeing underwear ads with “perfect” women

Let’s talk about bras. A good number of us deal with them, but that doesn’t mean we necessarily want to see them five times every morning. Since many of us can relate to the annoyance of endlessly scrolling past ads, one woman wrote an open letter to Instagram about the numerous bra ads on the app and why they’re problematic.

That woman was Lauren Hallden, who had her letter published on Medium. In it, she explained that she knows why she’s probably seeing ads like this, but illustrated the ridiculous amount by separating a good chunk of her sentences with different bra ads.  “Somewhere, an algorithm has (correctly) identified that I do yoga, and yeah, I guess I’ve bought a sports bra or two in my day,” she said, before mentioning that the system still had a few flaws to work out.  For one, they should work on chatting with women for their market research, as she noted that seeing numerous photos of athletic women who looked perfect was a bit of a blow on her self-esteem.

"I’ve started feeling like maybe you don’t realize what being exposed to an endless string of half-naked, extremely thin women is doing to people like me?" she wrote. "You know, I mostly just came here to see pictures of my friends' dogs and kids and shit."

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She has a good point — with Instagram, it’s tough to avoid scrolling through ads. If every ad is for the same type of product, displayed on women with the same type of body, it can be hard to enjoy the social media site for what it should be — a place to catch up on the people you choose to follow.

Hallden said that she tried to control the problem herself but was only able to say the ads weren’t relevant. That didn’t stop the problem.

"Overall, I don’t think I’m seeing fewer bra-stagrams," she wrote. "For my efforts, I’ve been rewarded with slightly different shapes of partially-naked women. But not always."

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We hope that the open letter to Instagram does some good and that the platform takes Hallden’s suggestion to heart. While ads are important to keep a business running, at least they can find ways to make women feel like they’re beautiful at any size, and acknowledge that we have interests that span well beyond bra and underwear sales.