the lack of racial diversity fails to embrace all women
You wouldn’t initially assume that the result of a positive body image campaign, such as Dove’s would elicit a negative response characterized by words like “uncomfortable” and “angry.” A blogger, Jazzylittledrops validly critiques Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty in just one sentence by declaring, “In a six minute and thirty six second video, women of color were on screen for less than ten seconds.” This is a major issue of Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty and it hasn’t only been highlighted by this one blogger. In another popular article, a blogger angrily highlights that the diversity among the main participants of the campaign is minimal and the lack of different ethnicities is a major advertising flaw.
Dove’s campaign fits the mold of many other advertising campaigns, as campaigns by definition are always more than just one advertisement. The Real Beauty Campaign is also comprised of videos and photographs that show women illustrating how popular advertisements and standards of beauty have affected their views of how they look. One popular video is of “average” women describing how they felt they appeared to an artist, followed by a stranger describing how the women had looked to them. This resulted in two pictures, one from the self perception of the woman being drawn and the other, more realistic, from the strangers point of view. Although this video was intended to make women realize that they’re too harsh on themselves and that imperfection is a large aspect beauty, the message was held back by the lack of diversity of the women in the video. This was the video’s fatal flaw. Of the major women in the video, all four were Caucasian, three were blonde with blue eyes, all were thin, and all were young, with the oldest woman appearing to be just forty years old. This is an obvious limiting factor due to the fact that the lack of racial diversity caught many consumers’ eyes instead of the message the video held. Throughout the video, there was one shot of an African American woman and Asian woman’s head, but minimal attention was paid to them. This is not representative of the population being shown, indicating poor execution of what appeared to be a brilliant idea. This major flaw in Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty hinders them message they were trying to get across and left many consumers infuriated rather than inspired.
In a recent Business Insider’s post, Laura Stampler explained and emphasized why people “hate Dove’s ‘Real Beauty Sketches’ Video” that was described above. She rightfully so, but matter-of-factly asserts that, “In fact, most of “real” and “beautiful” women are white, but that is just not the case." She claims that there is much more to beauty than those who are considered to be traditionally attractive, and that needs to be shown in order for Dove’s campaign to be both effective and realistic. True beauty is not defined by just one skin color, nor is it only skin deep, and Dove failed to illustrate that to the necessary degree.
From these assertions comes a great sense of cognitive dissonance, which is defined as the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes related to behavioral decisions and attitude changes. This is exemplified by the consumers feeling like they can’t trust the brand which hurts their self-esteem and body image as well as lowers the company’s sales, when they feel like they should be inspired by the beauty campaign. For example, Kate Fridikis of Psychology Today described the execution of the Dove Sketches video as “some lovely, thin, mostly white women who are all pretty young,” defining beauty in a new, but still inaccurate way. Business Insider summarized her opinion by stating that the video only focuses on a very small subset of women, failing to recognize many major and minor racial groups. It was also expressed that this leaves many members of such groups feeling disappointed and that they cannot be a part of the changing beauty standards.
Dove’s campaign fits the mold of many other advertising campaigns, as campaigns by definition are always more than just one advertisement. The Real Beauty Campaign is also comprised of videos and photographs that show women illustrating how popular advertisements and standards of beauty have affected their views of how they look. One popular video is of “average” women describing how they felt they appeared to an artist, followed by a stranger describing how the women had looked to them. This resulted in two pictures, one from the self perception of the woman being drawn and the other, more realistic, from the strangers point of view. Although this video was intended to make women realize that they’re too harsh on themselves and that imperfection is a large aspect beauty, the message was held back by the lack of diversity of the women in the video. This was the video’s fatal flaw. Of the major women in the video, all four were Caucasian, three were blonde with blue eyes, all were thin, and all were young, with the oldest woman appearing to be just forty years old. This is an obvious limiting factor due to the fact that the lack of racial diversity caught many consumers’ eyes instead of the message the video held. Throughout the video, there was one shot of an African American woman and Asian woman’s head, but minimal attention was paid to them. This is not representative of the population being shown, indicating poor execution of what appeared to be a brilliant idea. This major flaw in Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty hinders them message they were trying to get across and left many consumers infuriated rather than inspired.
In a recent Business Insider’s post, Laura Stampler explained and emphasized why people “hate Dove’s ‘Real Beauty Sketches’ Video” that was described above. She rightfully so, but matter-of-factly asserts that, “In fact, most of “real” and “beautiful” women are white, but that is just not the case." She claims that there is much more to beauty than those who are considered to be traditionally attractive, and that needs to be shown in order for Dove’s campaign to be both effective and realistic. True beauty is not defined by just one skin color, nor is it only skin deep, and Dove failed to illustrate that to the necessary degree.
From these assertions comes a great sense of cognitive dissonance, which is defined as the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes related to behavioral decisions and attitude changes. This is exemplified by the consumers feeling like they can’t trust the brand which hurts their self-esteem and body image as well as lowers the company’s sales, when they feel like they should be inspired by the beauty campaign. For example, Kate Fridikis of Psychology Today described the execution of the Dove Sketches video as “some lovely, thin, mostly white women who are all pretty young,” defining beauty in a new, but still inaccurate way. Business Insider summarized her opinion by stating that the video only focuses on a very small subset of women, failing to recognize many major and minor racial groups. It was also expressed that this leaves many members of such groups feeling disappointed and that they cannot be a part of the changing beauty standards.