Instagram comedian unwittingly becomes model in diet patch ad

An online comedian is seeing her photos being used to sell diet patches without her permission.

Australian Celeste Barber, known for parodying photos of celebrities on Instagram, was notified by a fan that her photos are being used on the shopping website Wish. On the page, her photos are being used as a ‘before’ picture to sell weight loss patches.

Barber’s Instagram account mainly parodies the effortless way celebrities model for photos by putting her self-deprecating spin to the photos, usually highlighting her less-than-perfect body compared to the well-toned ones of the celebrities.

The listing on Wish contains two photos Barber had previously parodied on her Instagram account. One photo has her stretched over a bathtub, trying to imitate a topless model doing the same thing. The other image shows an image of Barber attempting to seduce a man, a parody of a GQ shoot with model Naomi Campbell and rapper Skepta. Despite the fact that the "before" (Barber’s photos) and "after" pictures clearly feature completely different people, the listing claims to be showing the results of a diet patch. It also puts Barber in a bad light as she is shown to be unattractive in the “before” photos.

Wish is a shopping website that features items direct from Chinese merchants at extremely cheap prices. The diet patches on the site are being sold for as cheap as 100 pieces for US$2. Valued at US$8.5 billion, the company’s website is targeted at low income shoppers, it has since gotten a reputation for low quality items and slow deliveries. And now, copyright infringement.

Barber called out Wish on Twitter: “Hey @WishShopping what’s this all about? You can’t use my photos especially to sell body shaming products!”

There was no response from Wish but it seems her tweet had an effect as the merchant on the platform has since taken down Barber’s photos.

For Barber, she was lucky that her calling out of Wish on this copyright infringement resulted in them taking down the photo. Although little harm was done, Barber did not proceed further. We did a search for diet patches and got results for the product with similar packaging, but with different photos. We wonder how many of these photos are being used without their owners’ permission. The sellers on the Wish platform have names as generic as Braveheart1, mingqiao and Wuliang Baby, and it would be difficult to track down their identities. Barber might want to consider using watermarks, which can serve as a deterrent for casual photo thieves. Watermarks are an identifying marker when the thieves are too lazy to remove them.