“The idea of beauty is our own to conceptualize,” is what we hear at the end of one of Dove’s “Real Beauty” ads. For those of you who have not yet seen these ads, let me enlighten you on a particularly important one. This most recent ad is an extremely moving “Real Beauty Sketches” video in which well respected forensic artist, Gil Zamora, sketches a series of women who are hidden behind a curtain. The first sketch drawn is based on each woman’s description of her physical appearance. The second sketch, however, is based on a stranger’s descriptions of these women. The point of this social experiment is to show women they are too hard on themselves. Later in the video, you see the stranger’s descriptions create much more realistic and “beautiful” sketches of each of the women. As the sketches are revealed to each of the women, they realize the impact their negative self image has on the sketches. Warning: This may induce tears, especially if you are one of many women who suffers from having a poor self-image.
There have been critics of Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign who claim that these ads are “fake.” In an otherwise insightful and interesting piece, Virginia Prostel of The Huffington Post wrote shebelieves Dove’s goal and overall message is appealing, though ineffective. She offers many valid points for her argument to which I respectfully disagree, though in the interest of time, I will only address a few.
Prostel maintains, “When you set out to portray beauty, rather than, say, kindness or intelligence, you wind up showing people who are better looking than average.” This statement is flawed in that Prostel is completely missing Dove’s point in these ads, which is for women to create their own concept of beauty. “Better looking than average” is an idea that suggests beauty can be defined, which it cannot. This statement also suggests that beauty, intelligence and kindness do not go together, which is a horribly damaging and false assumption. The women in this ad are all so physically different that I believe it is impossible to define them as “better looking than average.” What is average? What is better than average? Everyone is different and everyone has flaws that make them unique. Not only are the women in this ad different races, shapes and sizes, each of them has a quality they don’t like about themselves. Though this video is primarily addressing physical appearance, kindness and intelligence are not excluded entirely.
Prostel goes on to say, “The women in the film aren’t just attractive. They skew toward a trim, healthy, ‘natural’ style that reflects the shoot’s San Francisco location. They were ‘women that could represent well Dove’s concept of ‘Real Beauty.’” Once again, Prostel is attempting to create a definition of beauty regarding this group of women. As I watched the video, I honestly did not believe these women were skewed in Dove’s “style.” One of them is blonde, tan and skinny, and believes she has a large jaw. One of them is extremely fair-skinned with red hair who believes that since she is not a size two, she is fat. Though there are many other women in this video, even the two women I mention serve to show the diverse spectrum of women in this ad. They don’t have a specific “style” as Prostel claims. Yes, they are healthy and natural, but what is wrong with pushing an idea of beauty that includes health and a natural look? In my opinion, it is much better than the American idea of beauty which currently and unfortunately exists today—the size zero girl with huge, and more likely than not, fake boobs.
Though Prostel has a very good point, kindness and intelligence are absolutely the most important qualities of a person, expecting Dove to completely exclude physical beauty is simply unrealistic in the society in which we live. We live in a society where physical beauty is important; trying to ignore that would actually be ineffective.
What will potentially work is trying to redefine, or perhaps even better, remove society’s detrimental idea of beauty, which is exactly what Dove is attempting to do. I will endlessly defend these ads. Of course, Dove is also trying to make a profit, as every company is, but it is doing so in a much more honorable way than many others. Telling women they are beautiful, telling them to stop being so hard on themselves, telling them to create their own concept of beauty, telling them it’s okay to not look like a Victoria’s Secret model is a pretty damn good message to send. I have friends who are absolutely gorgeous inside and out, but they don’t think they’re good enough and it kills me to see such great people feel that way about themselves. So thank you, Dove. I hope these ads will be a shift in the way women are portrayed in the media. I hope my friends will be able to see how beautiful they are. I hope every woman does, because every woman deserves to. To any woman, old, young, tall, short, blonde, brunette, “fat” or skinny, if you have not seen Dove’s “Real Beauty Sketches” ad, I absolutely urge you to do so.
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