My Stalker Flew 1,000 Miles To Find Me

Insta star Andreea Cristina, 30, found herself in danger.

- Bess Browning And Sarra Gray

Rushing home from my job in finance, I flipped open my laptop and started typing. Writing about my new favourite face scrub, I attached a picture, 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 in college. At first, I would just share my favourite recipes, but when I started to post about different skincare products and beauty treatments, my audience seemed to love it.

When I was younger, my grandma Valerie, 70, had taught me the importance of a decent scrub and cleanser and told me to always use a night cream.

‘Make sure you take your make-up off thoroughly,’ she’d say. Now I was teaching others the lessons I’d learnt from her.

And when Instagram came along in October 2010, it made sense to set up a profile. At first, I just had a personal account, sharing snaps of camping trips with my friends or sunshines hots on the beach.

Then, my cats Mushball and Peeny Houdini, became Instagram sensations, gaining 50,000 followers. Wanting to share my beauty advice, I started a new account @andreeacristina. Using Peeny’s account and specific hashtags with my posts, as well as teaming up with a few other beauty bloggers to promote each other, my audience was growing daily.

Rising star

Soon, I had thousands of followers. ‘Love your page. Can’t wait to try this new product,’ the comments would say. The positive response was really overwhelming.

As the years went on and my following 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, but not all of them were good. More than 400 nasty comments flooded in every week, most of them from men.