Social media is giving a voice to top models who have built their careers as pretty, non-speaking faces - but getting their facts wrong can cause their high cheekbones many blushes.
"I realised there was an audience interested in what I had to say, not just the images from my work," says model Coco Rocha, who alternates personal posts with a more businesslike platform to highlight brands and magazines she's shooting for as well as her charitable causes - such as helping raise money for communities in earthquake-striken Haiti.
At 23, Rocha is no longer the new girl in town, but her fan base of more than 200,000 Twitter followers and 66,000 Facebook friends gives her "longevity," she says. "Because I have a voice and I'm sticking to having that voice, I feel like I have extended my career."
Name recognition increases a model's value, believes Sean Patterson, president of the Wilhelmina agency. Models who become celebrities, online or otherwise, might even help reverse the trend of movie and pop stars with "relatable" personal stories taking the A-list advertising jobs and magazine covers that used to go to models.
Models with an online following can also create extra buzz for brands they represent. "I imagine, for example, that Victoria's Secret likes that Doutzen (Kroes) has so many Twitter followers and that she tells them, 'Watch the Victoria's Secret show I'm in at 9pm," Patterson said. In addition, social media lets models show the interesting lives they lead off the runway, and it's a way for chatty, likable personalities to shine.
In the 1990s, Christy Turlington, Cindy Crawford and Linda Evangelista were household names, but they didn't get to create their own personas the way Rocha or Kroes do today. The public got to know those supermodels in gossip columns and paparazzi photos; this newer generation posts notes about their yoga poses.
"I started out doing all this as a fun thing by myself," said Kroes. "My big thing was how I could give back and how I could tell people I was involved in charity, but then I figured out how it all fits together: I realised I could build my own profile."
Liane Mullin, co-founder of Modelinia.com , notes that models have a lot of credibility when it comes to posts about "fashion, beauty, fitness, nutrition and food. That's what they're experts in. If they recommend a mascara, they've had it put on them 10,000 times, and I've never worn that much mascara myself, then I trust her opinion."
Models also tend to be very active online once they start. "They're traveling all over the world, sometimes with people they don't know, and they're lonely at times. Social media keeps them company and connected," says Mullins.
When news broke of Brazilian model Alessandra Ambrosio's second pregnancy, the Victoria's Secret pin-up took to Facebook to post picture showing her daughter stroking her swelling stomach on the beach to confirm the rumours.
Model Heide Lindgren wasn't sure about social media at first. She worried about alienating friends and family, fans or potential employers. But when she wanted to promote a pet cause, Models4Water, which supports clean drinking water efforts, doing it online was the best way. It put her in touch with people in the renewable energy industry, pet lovers and fashion fans. From there, she was hooked.
"You can make yourself into more than a model this way. ... It introduces me to a new audience, and it might be more people seeing my posts than something that's in Vogue," Lindgren said. She mentions products occasionally, but not as paid endorsements. She's not sure pitchwoman is the online personality she wants: "I want it to be 100 per cent real."
Rocha is posting more than ever, but she's vowing to self-censor a little after tweeting last month from the U.S. premiere of "Iron Lady" that she was excited to see Glenn Close. The movie stars Meryl Streep.
"People tweeted back right away: 'dumb model,' but it was A LOT of people," she said. "When I started, models were booked only for their cheekbones. Now I think I get bookings because people will say they respect me, or we stand for the same things, or they think what I have to say is interesting. It's better to hear that than just, 'You have gorgeous cheekbone structure.'"
