Celebrity3 min(s) read
Published 13:43 06 Aug 2026 GMT
The woman who went viral in 2017 for looking like a corpse version of Angelina Jolie has opened up on how she did it.
Known online as Sahar Tabar, the social media influencer gained a following for chilling snaps of her looking like a beyond-the-grave version of the Hollywood superstar.
Many may have been creeped out by the snaps over the years, but it turns out that she looks nothing like the images.
Sahar never looked like the skeletal-faced woman with sunken cheeks and hollow eyes shown in photos.
While some were surprised, others saw through it and knew that the pictures were fake from the start.
Real name Fatemeh Khishvand, the 25-year-old Iranian woman gained worldwide virality, which helped spawn headlines such as 'botched plastic surgery' and '50 operations gone wrong'.
Sahar appeared on Rokna, an Iranian state-owned media channel, and showed her real face for the first time.
She looked like a normal person, with no obvious irregularities like those shown in the images she had posted years earlier.
The former influencer explained that her mother had told her to stop posting the images, but she hadn't listened.
"Sometimes the words of a stranger or a friend can be more important than those of a parent," she explained.
She described her posts as a 'vulgarity' that helped her become famous, but said she would not be going back to Instagram.
"I would not even put Instagram on my phone anymore," she claimed.
Sahar admitted of the images: “What you saw on Instagram was the computer effects I used to create the image.”
“Cyberspace was an easy way. It was much easier than becoming an actor,” she was quoted as saying about her five minutes of fame, as she 'wanted to be famous since I was a child'.
That's right, all she used was makeup and Photoshop - but the images caused issues with the Iranian government.
Two years after her rise to fame, when she was just 18, Sahar was arrested by Iranian authorities as part of a crackdown on social media influencers.
The social media creator was charged with blasphemy, inciting violence, encouraging youth corruption, and gaining income through inappropriate means.
In December 2020, she fell foul of the nation's strict censorship laws and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
It was reported that while she was inside, she caught Covid-19 and was put on a ventilator, as her lawyers pushed for her release on medical grounds.
Sahar would be released on bail in mid-December 2020, having served around 14 or 15 months.
Alinejad confirmed the news on Twitter: "Today Iranian teenager who posted heavily distorted images of herself online and was jailed for 10 years has been freed after massive media pressure."
Despite an initial 10-year sentence, public pressure led to her release from prison after just 14 months, as reported by activist Masih Alinejad.
