Scatter Brain says:
In 1970, Ray Stevens hit it big on the pop charts with his single, Everyone Is Beautiful In Their Own Way. America loved the song, but evidently the beauty industry’s marketers and advertisers turned a deaf ear.
For decades now in an attempt to sell beauty products, these companies have convinced us that we need to have shinier hair, straighter hair, curlier hair, clearer skin, minimize wrinkles, alleviate bumps, have fewer lumps, firmer necks, straighter teeth, whiter teeth, bigger boobs, flatter stomachs, junk in the trunk, no cellulite, hairless legs, hairless armpits, painted nails, smooth feet, higher cheekbones, lower foreheads, poutier lips, perfectly sculpted eyebrows and smell really, really good.
Close shave
Seriously, did you know that women shave underarms and legs because of a targeted marketing assault from depilatory and razor manufacturers? A 1982 article from the Journal of American Culture by Christine Hope entitled “Caucasian Female Body Hair and American Culture” states that U.S. women were motivated into shaving underarm hair by a sustained marketing campaign that began in 1915 with an ad in Harper’s Bazaar for a depilatory product that informed the reader, “Summer Dress and Modern Dancing combine to make necessary the removal of objectionable hair.” In 1922, women’s razors made their debut in the Sears and Roebuck catalogue. I had a college roommate who learned all of this in a marketing class and in protest stopped shaving legs and armpits. Come the summer sundress season, it was NOT a pretty sight.
Which leads me to my point. Conscious effort or no, this bombardment from these companies telling us how we should look has caused some profound shifts in our attitudes about ourselves. Many medical professionals look to the media and cosmetic and beauty advertising in particular as culprits in the rise of eating disorders and self-esteem issues that seem to be particularly prevalent among teenage girls.
I was around when Twiggy hit the scenes and the ultra thin waif look has never really left the modeling industry. And unfortunately, this is where so many images of how we think we should look come from. I have read recently that the fashion industry is starting to mandate weight minimums for models, especially after the death of one model from an eating disorder.
Real Beauty
That’s why I am so thrilled and fascinated by Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty. This all-encompassing advertising campaign features women of all ages, ethnicities and sizes. They don’t have perfect hair, they don’t all have straight teeth, a few have lumps and a few have bumps but they are all beautiful.
Now, I’m not here to discuss Dove products and whether or not they make any claims that are questionable from an advertising standpoint. I’m here to applaud them in their efforts to market to real women. And I am certainly not the first to recognize this. This marketing and coordinated advertising effort is receiving kudos from celebrities and regular women from all over the world because it resonates.
It’s refreshing to see women like you and me who aren’t air brushed and aren’t fluffed, buffed and sent to a professional hair stylist before being photographed or filmed. This is advertising I can get behind. Not only as an advertising professional and a creative writer, but also as the mother of a teenage girl that I watch like a hawk for any of the tell tale signs that she’s succumbing to the lure of the cosmetics and beauty industry hype.
Dove has gone even farther than using real women in their ads. They’ve established a self-esteem fund to help girls see themselves as the beautiful human beings.
Dove’s advertising agency, Ogilvy and Mather has done some groundbreaking work for this company in the tradition of their founder, advertising pioneer David Ogilvy. Among the best of this work are three short films/long commercials. One is entitled Evolution and shows how a model is made ready for a photo shoot. Another is called Onslaught and is a rather alarming montage of the images we are bombarded with from the beauty industry. The third is ProAge featuring tastefully nude women in their 50′s and 60′s all of whom are gorgeous.
In fact, hold your head high. We ARE all beautiful.
To see more of this landmark advertising, you can go to Ogilvy and Mather’s creative portfolio on the web here: http://www.ogilvy.com/portfolio/portfolio.php or to the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty on the web here: http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/
Scatter Brain is a real-life copywriter for hire. If you’re interested in contacting her with business opportunities, please write to “Scatter Brain” care of thebeautybrains@gmail.com.
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
I used to think really highly of Dove for doing this sort of thing. But is not the parent company of “Dove” the same as “AXE”. The marketing of Axe can be quite demeaning to women, and the messages I get from both seem to be rather conflicted.
They are one in the same. Unilever.
i absolutely love that video – it’s astounding and really rings a bell. while i love beauty products and fashion, it shouldn’t be something we are defined by, and the definition of “beautiful” that we are often hit with shouldn’t be what we strive to be.
There was a NY Times article within the last couple of months about a man famous for his airbrushing and photo-arranging. According to him, the Dove women are airbrushed.
Good for them to be doing something different to their competitors.
It is true the women in the dove ads are airbrushed.
The Dove ads are still more diverse and posiitve than most.
I find the Dove ads extremely hypocritical. I know that they use “normal” women, but still.. They market the same products that everyone else to make women look perfect.
These women in the dove ad are air brushed, as are those on the covers of Ladies Home Journal, Redbook and many others.
IT is a shame that Dove has to do this and proclaim their ads are different,more normal women. This is False! These women may be different sizes, but they MOST certainly are given every cosmetic professionals care BEFORE these photos are taken and if any major flaw shows- it is taken care of. This is an AD for DOVE — Who are they Kidding?
Why was this “article” posted here to begin with? I gather from the “copywriter” thing at the bottom, that this post is just an advertisement made to look like an article. I just started to read this site on a regular basis and that’s the first I’ve seen of that sort of thing here,
Makes me feel a little uneasy about the other really good posts, when I see an advertisement in the guise of an article.
Jules: No, this article is not an advertisement. Scatter Brain is a cosmetic copy writer who occasionally contributes opinion pieces for our blog. We let people know she’s available for assignments just in case they like what she writes in her blog posts. She doesn’t pay us anything to advertise.
I hope this clears things up for you. Thanks for being part of the Beauty Brains community.
I am surprised that The Beauty Brains would publish this without first knowing the facts- isn’t that what you’re all about? They DO airbrush the women- there was quite a bit of controversy over this. If we are to trust that you really are as factual and well-researched as you purport to be, you gotta keep up with the news. And they most certainly ARE “fluffed and buffed” and professionally beautified before they shoot the ads.
A low level of airbrushing isn’t a shock — I’ve done airbrushing on photos of university chancellors, for pete’s sake. Not to make them look like Brad Pitt, but just to ameliorate undereye bags or whatnot.
Compared to the LITERAL starvation diets most models follow, and the frankly scary-looking plastic faces on most advertisements that make the women look like they aren’t even human, the mild level of airbrushing in the Dove commercials is an absolute stunner. It’s not small-scale blemish evening-out that’s the problem with the modelling industry. It’s making human beings look like abnormal, frightening, elongated antelopes and then promoting ONLY that image as acceptable that’s the problem. After a steady diet of frozen-faced androids who have had seven blur filters run on their faces until they look like they’re made of injection-molded plastic, it’s nice to see pictures that show just how not frightening, pretty, and beautiful actual humans can be.
Of course, some of us can see that by ignoring the ads and looking at the women around us, but many can’t seem to see a female face unless it’s in a magazine and has got a pot of cold cream posed next to it.
Just watched that film — it’s brilliant, but frankly, most women do want to look like that, do believe that stuff, and do fall for it, so as long as they are doing it themselves, they can talk to their daughters all they want, but if their girls see Mommy saying, “Pretty is on the inside,” while Mommy is getting botulism jabbed into her face and angsting about every morsel going into her mouth, it’s not going to make much difference. That will probably tick someone off, but it’s the truth.
Telling your daughter that pretty is on the inside while she sees you hating your fat, disgusting, ugly thighs and blaming them for causing global warming, mass extinction, and outbreaks of ebola … well, your daughter will know what you really think no matter what you say to her. We need to work on ourselves before we start working on our daughters.
I guess I just get tired of the blaming of the industry. Women fall for that junk hook, line, and sinker. Women have no one to blame but themselves for it. I used to make dozens of arguments about how it was the corporate, patriarchal, industrial blah-blah’s fault, but you know what? It’s women’s fault. If we really wanted to stop that garbage, it’d stop cold.
Well I was going to respond to the airbrush uproar, but Janis has stated the facts more succinctly than I could.
I suppose I should have been more clear in the section about using models that are real, but brevity is key here so I didn’t go into a long discourse on airbrushing and photoshopping. I’ve never worked with an art director or designer worth their salt that doesn’t spend an inordinate amount of time on the look of an ad. This could mean hours of kerning type or perhaps airbrushing a wrinkle from a model’s blouse or manipulating a shadow for more visual impact. Airbrushing does not mean that the look of the model is changed, it might just mean that the photo was “cleaned up” to remove distracting elements like a stray hair or a slight glare off a shiny fabric.
I’m sure the images in the Dove ads had some slight airbrushing done. I honestly would be surprised if they didn’t. Raw photography is seldom fit to go straight to print. My point was and still is the actually appearance of the models was not changed. If you saw one of these women in an ad and then ran into them on the street, you’d be able to instantly recognize them. This much cannot be said in most instances with the heavy makeup, wigs and extensive photo editing that takes place. A model ultimately looks nothing like his or her true self once the photo has reached completion.
Again, as Janis pointed out, the images of the Dove models may have been slightly airbrushed, but not to the extent that their appearance was altered. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have pronounced freckles, obvious rolls of fat, gaps in their teeth or wrinkles in their skin. If you don’t believe me, watch the ProAge Ad on YouTube. These are women that look just like you and me.
And for the record, I neither pay the Beauty Brains nor accept compensation from the Beauty Brains. They tap my knowledge from time to time to discuss advertising trends and like it or not, Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty is a huge trend away from the norms we see in the beauty advertising industry slight airbrushing included.
FYI, the following is Dove’s statement regarding the airbrushing controversy. I’m amazed to be honest that it was controversy at all. The entire brouhaha was perpetrated by a brief statement by Dangin in a much broader article featured in the New Yorker. Anyway, for those of you who feel I didn’t do my homework, here’s Dove’s statement:
Statement from Dove about The New Yorker Article
9 May 2008, 4:45pm
Dove’s mission is to make more women feel beautiful every day by widening the definition of beauty and inspiring them to take great care of themselves. Dove strives to portray women by accurately depicting their shape, size, skin color and age.
The “real women” ad referenced in recent media coverage was created and produced entirely by Ogilvy, the Dove brand’s advertising agency, from start to finish and the women’s bodies were not digitally altered.
Pascal Dangin worked with photographer Annie Leibovitz (Ogilvy has never employed Mr. Dangin on the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty), who did the photography for the launch of the Dove ProAge campaign, a new campaign within the Campaign for Real Beauty. There was an understanding between Dove and Ms. Leibovitz that the photos would not be retouched – the only actions taken were the removal of dust from the film and minor color correction.
“Let’s be perfectly clear – Pascal does all kinds of work – but he is primarily a printer – and only does retouching when asked to. The idea for Dove was very clear at the beginning. There was to be NO retouching and there was not,” confirmed Annie Leibovitz, commenting on the ProAgecampaign.
Mr. Dangin responded, “The recent article published by The New Yorker incorrectly implies that I retouched the images in connection with the Dove “real women” ad. I only worked on the Dove ProAge campaign taken by Annie Leibovitz and was directed only to remove dust and do color correction – both the integrity of the photographs and the women’s natural beauty were maintained.”
It sounds like Dangin messed up and said a lot more than he was supposed to about how much the photos were altered. And now he and Dove are doing a lot of backpeddling.
In the original New Yorker article, he talks about what a challenge it was to make the models look attractive. Now he’s saying that all he did was remove dust and do color correction?
The only thing that surprises me is that
anyone was naive enough to believe that there never had been any photoshopping in the first place.
This is and AD for Dove – just plain women – huh- your average everyday woman- if these women were just plain everyday women- with no extra make-up artist or hair stylist on duty to make their magic come alive on the page- how many women would take another look at Dove and think Gosh if this product can do this for her,maybe it will do the same for me– very few= the purpose of the ad and the extra touch-ups that was- needed to improve the looks of these women, was to sell their products. Dove is NO different than any other company trying to sell products.