Selfies, Social Media, and Self-Esteem: Dove Launches New Confidence Campaigns
Dove’s newest Self-Esteem Projects tackle the confidence and social media. (Photo: Dove)
Here’s an all too familiar scenario: You post a selfie on social media and anxiously refresh your feed, waiting for the likes to come in. Too few likes or a negative comment and you consider deleting it, despite the fact that it took you 15 minutes to perfect your pose, adjust your lighting, and edit the photo before hitting the publish button. You’re not alone. According to new research from personal care brand Dove, one in four girls in the UK have deleted a photo if it did not get enough likes and eight out of 10 women encounter negativity on social media that impacts their self-esteem. In an effort to change the way social media impacts the confidence of women around the world, Dove has launched two new initiatives under it’s Self-Esteem Project umbrella: A new Pinterest page that provides resources for talking about confidence and self-esteem boosting activities, and a campaign in the UK called #NoLikesNeeded, aimed at creating confidence and positive conversations on social media.
Tina Brown poses with two girls involved in Dove’s Self-Esteem program at the Women in the World Summit. (Photo: Dove)
At the Women in the World Summit hosted by Tina Brown in London this past weekend, the brand assembled a panel to discuss social media and body confidence. The women speaking on the panel included Scottish singer Nina Nesbitt, Dr. Susie Orbach co-founder of the Women’s Therapy Centre, NYU professor Terri Senft, and model Chantelle Winnie Harlow.
Orbach opened the discussion by pointing out that the issues with social media and its impact on body confidence and self-esteem have continued to get worse over the last few years, affecting women across a wide range of age groups and around the globe. “[Young girls] live on social media, which is very exciting, but aspects of it really harm them,” said Orbach. “They are learning about display as the way to engage with the world rather than contribution.”
An online survey of girls aged 13-23 in the UK also shows that the average girl spends 1 hour and 24 minutes preparing for selfies each week, with 50 percent of them not posting if they don’t like how they look. “One of the things that I’ve been finding is that more and more girls are coming to an awareness that body image when you’re talking about social media is 22 percent body and 78 percent image,” said Senft at the Summit. “That means liking, filtering, positioning, choices about sharing, and building your network.” Orbach highlighted Dove’s research, which shows most girls want to receive 126 ‘likes’ on a photo — three times more than they currently receive. The brand’s #NoLikesNeeded campaign sets out to show that the only “like” that really matters is their own.
Dove’s Change One Thing video shows that nine out of 10 girls want to change something about their appearance.
Just over a week before the conversation at the Summit, Dove also released it’s Change One Thing campaign, which includes a film that shows the pressures many girls feel to alter their appearance. In our selfie-obsessed culture, social media plays a huge role in creating the unrealistic expectations of how girls should look. Dove’s Speak Beautiful Social Media study found that 82 perfect of women feel the beauty standards set by social media are unrealistic. It is because of these pressures that 60 percent of girls will stop doing the things that they love because they feel bad about how they look.
The heartbreaking film shows young girls talking about the one thing they would like to change about themselves, from their hair and their height to their size and eye color, proving that beauty anxiety begins for many at a young age. “I had this thing that was way more different than just having a different hair texture or a different outfit. It was something I couldn’t change and didn’t ask for,” said Harlow at the Summit, talking about her struggles with the skin condition vitiligo that began when she hit middle school age. “It really haunted me as a child — I didn’t know what to do about it but I had to live with it.”
Resources available on Dove’s Self-Esteem Project Pinterest page. (Photo: Dove)
While the resources provided on the brand’s new Pinterest page set out to help guide our conversations about peer pressure, confidence, and social media, it was Harlow at the Summit who gave the best advice to the many young women in attendance: “Focus on your opinion of yourself, rather than the opinions of others.”
Related:
Model Winnie Harlow’s Inspiring Essay on Overcoming Bullying
