Journalism Blog #1: The Real Beauty Sketches

For my first assigned blog post, I chose Topic #1: Advertising. 

 

 

Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty:

The Real Beauty Sketches

 

 

 

 

 

Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? If this is so, then perhaps some of the beholders are blind, or viewing through a fun-house mirror, showing them a distorted version of themselves.  It is hard to find someone these days who is not thoroughly inundated with the media and its images. This is the age of the inferiority complex: On television, the internet, and in movies and magazines we see celebrities who, in a lot of our opinions, are the ideal epitome of human facial features, status and physicality. They are fit, beautiful, healthy, and seemingly want for nothing. It is then no wonder that a lot of people these days envy such celebs, and can’t help comparing themselves to these “ideals”. Even the most attractive among us harbors a kernel of insecurity that we aren’t as good-looking as we think they are. There are not many top-drawer companies in the beauty industry who are actively working on trying to get women to embrace, like, and accept who they are, physically. One such company is Dove, the popular soap, shampoo and conditioner manufacturer. No longer focused solely on making personal care items; they now have a social mission. Let me take you down the rabbit hole.

 

The content of the newest one of their ads, one of many of the campaign’s that I viewed, challenges our perception of how we look compared to how a newly formed acquaintance describes us. In this series of ads, called the “Real Beauty Sketches”, a forensic sketch artist sits on one side of a suspended sheet, which is totally obscuring the person sitting on the other side. The sketch artist then begins to draw the person, based on the description that person is giving the artist of themselves. After the artist has finished drawing the person (based only on their own descriptions), the person leaves without getting to see the picture. The artist then brings in another person, who is a total stranger to the first person, and the stranger then describes the person to the sketch artist. In the end, the first person now gets to view the two drawings. Needless to say, the drawings are very dissimilar. The only text in the ads is the single sentence at the end: You are more beautiful than you think. The music that plays in the background is very unobtrusive, and it is set in a minor key; which is a trick to get the viewers to respond in a deeper emotional way to the ad’s topic, which is the low self-esteem a lot of women carry with them and why they; why we, can’t see our own true beauty. The characters are seemingly normal people, like someone you might see in your everyday life. You might pass them walking in the street, or they could be a teller at your bank or a pastry chef at the bakery you love. They seem to be very relatable, so obviously the ad is using the plain-folks approach. The ad I viewed is six minutes and 36 seconds long, and it was published on April 14^th, 2013. It is part of a larger campaign, a series of ads, which Dove has been running for many years. This ad is simply one of the most recent, newest additions to the campaign’s box of tools. As I said before, this ad uses the plain-folks approach, and I think it’s obviously deliberate: the creators and designers of the ad are trying to drive home the fact that all people (not just those who are famous, or are models, et cetera) are beautiful even if they don’t think they are. This in turn makes us, the viewers, believe that we too are beautiful, because aren’t we just regular people as well, just like the women in that ad? I personally don’t think that these ads use the association principle. The argument could be made that the advertising legerdemain here is sub-rosa, but is still present in that the company who created these ads wants you to associate using their products with being a beautiful person. However, I would say that this argument is very faulty. Nowhere in the ad does the company try to sell you its product, rather, it is trying to sell you a product only you can create for yourself: confidence.

 

I think the ad is very different, in that Dove is the only company I’ve seen that is focused on trying to get people to accept themselves how they are instead of trying to get people to change because they aren’t good enough currently; or that they would be better versions of themselves if only they used the products featured in the ads the company is feeding them. It could be said that the target audience in this particular ad is women, of all ages, sizes, ethnicities, et cetera; because this ad is focusing on the perception the women have of themselves. But I believe that the message the ad imparts applies to everyone, not just to women. There aren’t any stereotypes in this ad, just people describing themselves honestly. I don’t find the message of the ad offensive, and I can’t imagine someone who would find it offensive. For the sake of time, I will narrow it down and say that the ad’s main strength is that it’s addressing a real problem that many people are facing every day; the way they feel about themselves. I had a hard time trying to come up with any weakness the ad might have. They aren’t discriminating against any race or body type in the women they used for the ads. Maybe the ads are focusing too much on our appearance being the most important thing (as in, if we don’t think we’re attractive then that somehow makes us less of a good person, or less interesting or desired), but in today’s society we are told that appearance and image pretty much are everything. So the ads are really focusing on not trying to dissuade these people that physical appearance is important, since that’s what they and the rest of us all believe to some extent, but rather that they can and should accept their appearance as it is instead of worrying that they aren’t good enough. The ads here are memorable to me, because honestly, I struggle with self-esteem issues as well, so I can connect with this issue. I watched most of these ads with my mother, and we were both affected by the message they imparted. So I would have to agree that they did in fact connect with their admittedly small target audience.

 

Strangely enough, I found in my background research that there are a select few groups who actually dislike these ads, and label them as anti-feminist because, in their opinion, the ads are propagating the message that women’s beauty is still the most important thing about us, and that we shouldn’t try to accept that we are all attractive or beautiful in one way or another. The critics of these ads go on to say that instead, society should basically learn to value women based solely on the positive values they have, excluding physical attractiveness; and that if society could do that then perhaps women wouldn’t all have inferiority complexes about their looks. There was also a blogger who complained that the ads actually are discriminating against minorities, and focusing too much on white people, because “people of color” only appear in the video for a small amount of time; and that the two black women who gave their descriptions to the sketch artist gave such “negative” comments as a round face shape and the fact that freckles are appearing with age. This line of reasoning is redundant, because the whole point of the ad is that everyone is describing themselves with negative features and flaws, not just the “women of color”.

 

 

 Based on the ad, I wouldn’t go out and buy Dove products, but that’s because the ad isn’t trying to convince me to buy their products. I would recommend that other people view these ads. I have to say that this ad didn’t teach me anything I didn’t already know, but that’s possibly because this isn’t the first series of ads focusing on self-esteem that Dove has published. I’ve been watching these ads of theirs since they first started making them.

 

 

"What's Wrong With Dove's Real Beauty Sketches Campaign?"

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