Someone sent me this video on an interesting transformation between the way someone really looks and how they turn a “regular person” into a model. It shows a woman sitting in a chair and you see her go from an average person to them doing her hair and make-up, and finally taking a picture, photoshopping it, and putting it on a billboard. These are the images that we show to our society, yet nobody sees a problem with it.
Have no fear though, Dove is out to set the record straight. They want you to know that Dove is there for you, for real women! They want you to trust them to show real images of real women and make you feel better about yourself. No matter what the media shows, Dove is there for you and they believe in the beauty of every woman.
One thing that’s interesting to me though is that it’s a Dove commercial about promoting real women and real beauty, yet when you watch their other commercials, their models are thin and beautiful and promote the stereotypes of beauty that our society has put before us. I have an issue with the company pretending that they care about “real people” and “real beauty” when the way they act defies that. This makes me think that Dove is simply using a tactic to try and prove a point, or to get people who don’t like commercials or the media to start turning to them for an “unbiased” or “unconventional” model of what beauty is.
I think they are playing our society and using unconventional forms of beauty to attract new customers and promote their products. Now, instead of using conventional beauty to attract women by saying “if you use our products you will be this beautiful,” they are using the scheme “if you’re a real woman, you’re beautiful the way you are, and we support women being beautiful just like you, so knowing that we support REAL BEAUTY, you should buy and use our products.”
I think this is a real problem that needs to be addressed by society, but I don’t think doing it to promote your product is a fair way of doing that. Our concept of beauty clearly needs to change, but this is not the way to do it. Someone with nothing to gain has to put out a video or a commercial like this.
Unruly Bodies 
I find this ad fascinating because although we may think we *know* that advertisements are photoshopped, actually seeing the process and the before and after pictures makes it more real than merely “knowing” it did before. Now I find that I am more skeptical of all the images I see, knowing how they can be manipulated. They change her entire face! It’s not really a photograph of the original model anymore, but of an invented person.
Before I knew it was a Dove commercial I saw this sequence in Miss Representation (http://www.missrepresentation.org/the-film/), a very interesting film we screened at UMBC last semester. There’s a copy in the library now and I very much recommend it! It gets at exactly what this video exposes: the misrepresentation of bodies and beauty in media.
This is actually one of my favorite commercials and I discussed this in my advertising class over the summer. I was very surprised that this commercial was by Dove because Dove always promotes “real people” and therefore to see them turn a real person into a fake billboard produced by Photoshop was disappointing. It’s also sad to see that our generation is placing a great emphasis on outer beauty instead of inner beauty. Every billboard or media advertisement we see exemplifies a “model” type female that is very slender or extremely curvaceous and natural looking. You rarely see a wider set female in advertising and if so people deem it unacceptable because it does not fit our norm.