From The Guardian UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/20/dove-real-beauty-sketches-ad-women-perfection
Dove’s latest campaign to get women to be more confident about their looks makes a powerful point, even if it’s only skin deep
Heather Long
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 20 April 2013
If you haven’t seen it already, it’s worth the three minutes of your life to watch Dove’s new ad, if only because it has sparked such a wide range of reactions. Some women wept at the end of it, immediately sending it to friends with “you must watch this” notes; others have gotten downright angry about it.
Let’s start with the obvious: it’s an ad, not a film festival documentary. It’s been edited heavily and has overly melodramatic music. And yes, at the end of the day, it’s trying to sell something, although it’s striking that no Dove products are mentioned during the entire three-minute clip, and the Dove brand itself isn’t even flashed on the screen until the final seconds. But all the cheesiness doesn’t take away from its powerful message: women are too often their own worst critics.
The ad follows a forensic artist, one of those people who draws crime suspects based on witnesses’ descriptions. In this case, he draws facial portraits of several women based solely on what they tell him. He can’t see them. Then he draws pictures of the same women based on what people who have only interacted with them for a short while describe. In almost every case, there’s a stark difference between the two images of each woman.
The self-described portraits are uglier, sadder and almost sour-looking in some instances. When the artist asks an African-American woman what her most prominent feature is, she says, “I have a fat, rounder face,” immediately honing in on the negative. Several females bemoan their ageing: crows feet around the eyes, more freckles. You can only imagine what they would have said if the portraits were full-body.
This isn’t novel. Plenty of studies have concluded that women tend to view themselves as worse-looking than they are. In an oft-cited 2003 research project, young women were asked to pick out their body image from a range of figures. On average, they picked figures that were 11lb (5kg) heavier than their actual weight (young men, by contrast, picked out a figure that was “better” than reality).
Continue reading at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/20/dove-real-beauty-sketches-ad-women-perfection
See Also:
The New York Times: Ad About Women’s Self-Image Creates a Sensation
Salon: Stop posting that Dove ad: “Real beauty” campaign is not feminist
