Is ‘ribcage bragging’ the most worrying trend yet?

FIRST came the thigh gap. that was quickly followed by the so-called ‘bikini bridge’ and the six pack. But the latest social media vanity is the most disturbing yet.

suddenly, being merely super slender is no longer good enough. today’s attentionseeking young thing must also have a proudly protruding ribcage.

it’s a look that supermodel-of-themoment Bella Hadid recently displayed on her instagram account. Artfully lying on her side in a barely-there bikini, arms above her head to ensure maximum ribcage exposure, the 20-year-old looked dangerously in need of a good meal.

A raft of models, singers and social media stars are also following this toxic trend which surely takes the cult of skinny to a worrying new low.

Model and actress Emily ratajkowski doesn’t even need to lie down to show us her bony bits. she’s thin enough to have clearly visible ribs when she stands up.

Bella who? — you may well ask. Emily what? they may not be familiar names to some but, rest assured, their influence is phenomenal. And if you aren’t aware of these women, then your daughters and granddaughters most certainly will be.

With millions of followers on instagram (Bella and Emily each have more than 12 million), these two international models are nothing short of icons to the teenage girls and 20-somethings who make up the bulk of their fans.

Just to drive the point home, Bella Hadid’s scarily skinny image has received 718,000 ‘likes’ to date. that’s a lot of fans thinking that having ribs so prominent you can count them is a good thing.

Even Britney spears, as famous for her yo-yo dieting as her singing, has got in on the act, desperate to show off the pounds she’s shed, by posing on a beach, stomach as flat as a board, ribcage jutting out.

WHEN instagram first became popular, all focus was on the thigh gap — the notion that a woman’s upper thighs should not touch when she is standing with her feet together. Young girls posted their thigh-gap selfies on social media, with some going as far as to measure it. the bigger the space the better you were doing.

then came the bikini bridge, which involved lying down and taking a picture of the space created between your bikini bottoms and your hip bones. the more your hips jutted out, the greater the space. And that meant you were doing great.

Lately, it has been all about the six pack, as young women put themselves through gruelling workouts in order to boast the sort of abs you’d normally expect to see only on an Olympic athlete.

With British teenagers the second most prolific users of the internet, constant exposure to such pictures is bound to take its toll on self-image.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that last week the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development showed that our teenage girls were among the most miserable in the world — Britain came 38th out of 48 countries for the proportion of teenage girls who felt satisfied with life.

if the publicity-grabbing, over-privileged celebrities and supermodels who revel in bragging about their jutting ribcages just paused to think about what these images really communicate, perhaps they might think twice before posting their bones for all to admire on instagram.