Selling Soap

Is Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” a cash-grab or the real deal?

By Nicole Cohen

Continued from page 2

I bet you’ll never see a Dove model in an Axe ad. The print-ad component of the Dove campaign has featured the faces and bodies of real women (read: not models) on billboards around the world, selling the idea that this is a brand that cares about the kind of beauty that comes from within. A visit to www.campaignforrealbeauty.ca greets you with: “For too long, beauty has been defined by narrow, stifling stereotypes ... we believe real beauty comes in many shapes, sizes and ages.” A while ago, a series of Toronto ads featured women with so-called flaws you never see in airbrushed ads: freckles, wrinkles, a flat-chested woman and a woman who is actually larger than a size zero. “Ugly spots or beauty spots?” asked the ad featuring a freckled woman. “Wrinkled or wonderful?” asked another.

Many people were pretty impressed that ads were finally featuring women that look less like femme-bots and more like themselves. After all, feminists have been critiquing advertising’s sexist, unrealistic and objectified vision of women for years. As Salon.com writer Rebecca Traister put it, Dove’s campaign was “a little ray of sanity in this anorexic world.”

But can a business that exists solely to make money sincerely promote social change? How excited should we get over a campaign like Dove’s—no matter how socially conscious it appears to be—when at the end of the day, the goal is to move product? In an e-mail interview last summer, Dove masterbrand marketing manager Erin Iles wrote, “The fact is we’re trying to do both. Dove hopes to inspire dialogue and encourage debate about beauty ... and educate and inspire women and girls.... We are also in the business of selling personal care products.... We choose to do so in a way that inspires and celebrates women of diverse ages, shapes and sizes, rather than showing them idealized images and telling them they must fit a specific beauty mould.”

Dove’s latest advertising blitz, which appeared in major American cities last summer and in Canada this spring, is titled “Real Women Have Real Curves” (as if we’d forgotten). The ads feature women ranging from size 6 to size 12, wearing nothing but plain white undies and big smiles, looking pretty pleased to be flaunting their bods. Dove says the ads weren’t airbrushed. The American models were recruited while at university, at work or in coffee shops and asked to appear in the ads just the way they were. In Canada, Dove held a casting call for women who wanted to show off their natural bodies—an event that made national news.

I won’t deny that it was exciting to see these gorgeous, diverse women on billboards. Even though this is all just clever marketing, I told myself, it’s still a good thing. But, again, something seemed odd. The taglines for the ads are “Let’s face it, firming the thighs of a size 2 supermodel is no challenge,” and “New Dove Firming. As tested on real curves.”

Firming cream—a product, once again, designed to make women feel bad about themselves so that they’ll buy something they don’t need. Love your curves, we’re told, as long as they’re tight and firm. (And, by the way, firming cream isn’t some magic potion that will give you runner’s legs without the effort. Dove marketing manager Sharon MacLeod even admitted in a press release that “Dove is using these ads to show that using a skin firming product is not about transformation, but rather about taking care of your skin and feeling great about your curves.”) When it comes down to it, the Dove ads and all the buzz they’ve generated keep reminding us that being beautiful is the most important thing a woman can be.

Still, I believe that having positive images of women in the world is important, as long as we cast a critical eye on who’s providing those images and who’s profiting from them. For years, media watchers, activists and regular women have been critiquing the advertising industry for perpetuating negative stereotypes about women’s and men’s bodies and roles in society. So, it seems fitting that cosmetics advertising should be ground zero for change. Dove has the resources to put these images and messages out there where girls and young women can access them—magazines, shopping malls and bus stops.

Merryl Bear, director of NEDIC, agrees. “Change needs to start with all of us,” she says. “We need to challenge the inequities and practices within our institutions that harm the self-esteem and body image of others and ourselves. Companies are part of this.”

Iles tells me Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” and the Self-Esteem Fund are long-term. “There is a great deal of work to be done in changing the way society defines and judges beauty, and Dove aims to be a leading agent of change in this area,” she says. And though I don’t think we need soap ads to tell women they are beautiful, I hope they succeed.