Dove has unveiled a new chapter in its ongoing effort to hoodwink the conscientious consumer in need of a new bar of soap. Its “Campaign for Real Beauty,” like those of Benetton and The Body Shop before it, has been throwing up gorgeous billboards and television commercials featuring women of all shapes, sizes, and shades for years now. The message? Dove is different from other purveyors of beauty products; Dove cares for your skin as well as your well-being, as expressed by its honest portrayals of beauty in its various forms.
Dove’s new marketing strategy is to web-release ads that directly critcize deceptive representations of beauty. This past summer, the viral ad Evolution won a Grand Prix prize at Cannes. The minute-long film featured a woman’s face transformed through make-up and digital augmentation to an idealized face on a billboard wholly unlike the original. The spot concluded, “No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted.” Its sequel—Onslaught—which hit the web at the beginning of October, opens with a close-up of a guileless young girl, blissfully unaware of the pressure to be “younger, taller, lighter, firmer, tighter, thinner, softer,” followed by a fast-forward zoom through the debasing and all-too-prevalent beauty ads to which she will soon aspire. Through this campaign, Dove is taking a stand against such ads. Onslaught closes with this message: “Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does.”
Good advice, if only it wasn’t coming from a company owned by Unilever, which also owns Slim-Fast and Axe deodorant, products that are pushed by those very ads that Dove is denouncing.
