Is Dove’s New ‘Real Beauty’ Campaign Inclusive Enough?
Dove has been at the forefront of the body positivity movement for years, and on March 3, the brand recommitted to instilling confidence in women in a new and tangible way. Taking a pledge to use only regular women and never models in its campaigns, Dove aims to reflect the population’s diversity.
“Models reflect a narrow view of beauty,” the pledge reads. “Dove believes that beauty is for everyone and therefore features real women of different ages, sizes, ethnicities, hair color, type or style.”
Aiming to present women “as they are in real life,” the brand also pledges to eliminate any digital image distortion, allow women in campaigns to approve the images, and help educate 20 million more young people around the world on body confidence and self-esteem by 2020. “We never present the unachievable, manipulated, flawless images of ‘perfect’ beauty which the use of retouching tools can promote,” the brand writes.
To underscore these new standards, Dove released a new campaign shot by Mario Testino, featuring 32 women and girls, ages 11 to 71, from more than 15 countries.
A post shared by Dove Global Channel ???? (@dove) on Mar 2, 2017 at 12:59pm PST
“In 2017, the beauty landscape is wildly different to what it was when we launched the Dove campaign for real beauty,” Dove global vice president Sophie Galvani told PR Newsweek. “The Dove Real Beauty pledge and the Mario Testino photographs inspired by the pledge are the next step in our mission and commitment to women everywhere.”
Of the motivation for the new campaign, Galvani says, “Recent Dove research found that seven in 10 women and girls wish the media did a better job of portraying females more diversely in terms of race, age, shape, and size.”
The women in the campaign were selected based on their stories and backgrounds. “Some have discovered newfound confidence with age, while others are learning about real beauty through the lens of motherhood,” said Galvani. “Some women have struggled with being ‘different,’ while others have never tried to fit in. All women have the same thing in common — their unique real beauty story.”
But for some, the campaign is still not inclusive enough. Cat Pause, a fat-studies researcher at Massey University, told Stuff that women who aren’t included in social norms need to be better represented. “The kind of models they use are still ‘acceptable fat’ and body shapes,” she said. “They rely on mostly white, hourglass shaped women.”
Curvy fashion blogger Meagan Kerr agrees. “Even the specialty plus-sized stores, the models they use are on the very smallest plus size, size 14 not 27,” she told Stuff. “Occasionally, they’re not even plus-sized.”
And while Dove’s inclusivity pledge is noble, the brand needs to move past social norms to include the underrepresented groups that are particularly absent in the beauty industry, with almost no mainstream beauty brands embracing curvy models. If the brand’s own research is any indicator, customers want to see their own body shapes reflected in the campaigns.
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