Dove: Real Beauty or Real Bullshit?

In case you’ve somehow missed their latest ‘Real Beauty’ campaign, Dove has recently uploaded a YouTube video entitled ‘Real Beauty Sketches’. The premise behind the campaign is fairly simple: Hey women! You aren’t as ugly as you all think you are! Check out the video here.

The video has over 28 million views and is still growing strong, but there has been some fierce debate over whether the campaign is really as body-positive as it initially seems.

Successful or sneaky?

Some argue that the campaign is a breath of fresh air in comparison to the usual ads aimed at women. Instead of persuading us we need to fix our flaws, Dove tells us that they actually aren’t even there in the first place.

Others argue that Dove is still placing an unnecessary amount of worth in constructed standards of female beauty, as after all, their main interest is in making money. The video can be viewed as far too presumptuous with the whole ‘women are their own harshest critic’. It is also slightly insulting to be told ‘it’s all in your head’.

The Tab believes this is a very wide-reaching issue, and undertook an investigation into what our fellow students think of the campaign.

One female student commented: “I’m all for it. I know it’s a flawed campaign BUT it worked for me as an advert. Although we’ve got a long way to go, I think it’s the first step to inclusive representation of bodies in the media.”

Another female student agreed: “If you have time to pick apart the advert and criticise, it probably wasn’t aimed at you. The advert is aimed at people who constantly never feel good about their looks. It’s aimed at women who are crippled because they focus on their flaws.”

Another disagreed, saying: “I don’t like it, I feel like it feeds in to this idea that women shouldn’t think they’re attractive. Getting a whole host of beautiful women to go on camera and complain about how ugly they are is sneaky marketing.”

“You’re still going to go into your local store and find Dove products to make women more beautiful. As long as the company profits from wanting women to change, they can’t produce a truly body-positive campaign” offered another.

Dove’s prevous campaign

Dove has come under fire in the past for their previous attempts at ‘Real Beauty’ campaigns, admitting to using Photoshop “to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive” .

This is still an issue for some in the face of their new campaign, with one female student commenting:
“Dove pissed me off with their first “real beauty” campaign showing ONLY CURVY GIRLS as ‘real beauty’, whilst completely excluding slender and heavy set women. To make it worse, they create a video of a guy drawing a seemingly ugly picture when the person describes themselves, and making it look better when someone else describes them. They should keep trying but so far I don’t see success.”

What do you think of Dove’s campaign? Real beauty, or real bullshit? Post your comments below.