A Dutch student has managed to convince her friends she has been on a 5 week trip around Asia, without ever leaving her room. Zilla Van Den Born, 25, put together an elaborate ruse, including an entire album of holiday snaps, showcasing her time in Thailand, Cambodia and Laos – and all without leaving the couch.

In addition to creating the photos using Photoshop, Van Den Born gave the illusion some depth by talking to her parents using Skype while sat under a Thai umbrella ad sending texts in the middle of the night – to keep up with Asian time zones.

The complex deception was a graduation project for Van Den Born, to prove how social media doesn’t always reflect reality. She said: "My goal was to prove how common and easy it is to distort reality.

"I did this to show people that we filter and manipulate what we show on social media."

Over 42 days she photo shopped herself into pictures alongside tropical fish, tuk tuks and on pristine beaches.

Commenting on her motivation to undertake the project, Van Den Born said: "There is a constant battle going on between the two considerations: the photographed object being as beautiful as possible and it telling the truth," she added.

"What a picture really shows is not the exact situation as it really was, but what it represents.

"This ambiguous relationship with reality makes photography so fascinating to me. It raises questions about the representative power of pictures and reality itself."

Below: A collection of the before and after of the images Van Den Born used to fool her family and friends into believing she had taken a 5 week trip in Asia