The Story behind the Picture

It was the second time in 2 years that we went to naturist campsite L’Eglantière. We normally don’t revisit places often, especially not in such a short time. Our goal is to grow Naked Wanderings as a resource for naturist places, and if we keep going to the same places there’s not exactly much growing potential. But it was the end of the summer and we had a couple of days left in France. The previous months had been really busy, rushing from one place to another, arriving, getting to know the place a little, talk to the owners, search for interesting angles for blog posts and videos, and then spend the rest of our time recording those videos and taking the necessary pictures. Before we knew it, the three days would be behind us and we would move on to another place where the whole procedure restarted. Did we really want to do this once more? Especially now that we ended up in the neighbourhood of L’Eglantière, a campsite that we really enjoy visiting. We didn’t need much time to consider. There’s always next year to visit other resorts. And that’s how we once again drove through the gate of L’Eglantière, to stay in the exact same bungalow where we had stayed before and drink the exact same (very delicious) wine that we still remembered.

At the time, we started to receive an unusual amount for messages from women with questions about what naturism is really about. The end of the summer is a typical period for these questions, many people have been on holiday around Europe and some of them may have stumbled upon a nude beach or a sign towards a naturist resort. Their interest is tickled, they start searching for information on Google or social media and they end up with us. But this year, there seemed to be more female interest than in previous years. Probably the pandemic had something to do with it. Maybe it had encouraged people to search for new ways of traveling, closer to nature. Or shown people that there is no better time to try new things than today. It could also have been thanks to the uprise of the naked spa in Europe, which is typically popular among women. We don’t know the complete truth, but what we did know was that now might be a good time to do something to encourage female naturism even more. We decided to make a video about what it’s like to be a female naturist.

It was obvious that Nick would have to stay largely out of the picture. This had to be something for women, created by a woman. This was going to be Lins’ video. But we struggled with the content. Our first idea was what’s called a “talking head” video, where Lins would just sit in front of the camera and talk about naturism. But talking head videos are so boring. Then we thought about showing all the benefits of naturism, but we didn’t want it to be a naturist promo-video either. And then Lins came with the idea that would eventually be turned into a video. It was very simple, we would just film her day at a naturist campsite. What she does, how she experiences it, and how she felt about it.

And here is the result, in case you missed it at the time: https://youtu.be/2k4KqtB4j1o

We had no idea what the impact would be. The video took off quite quickly, which didn’t really come as a surprise. We had expected that the terms “female naturism” would create some attention. Unfortunately, not always from people with the right intentions. In our statistics we did see that it was being watched by women as well though. And then the messages started to flow in, from aspiring naturist women who loved to hear the honest experience as well as from long time naturist women who enjoyed some fresh content that resembled their own feelings. It had worked, and it keeps working, because at the time of writing, this video has been viewed more than 300 000 times.