Dove Evolution Campaign: beauty

Despite its age, the Dove Evolution Campaign will always pack a punch for me: a punch of authenticity.

In a world where images are digitally retouched, flaws are corrected by the magic wand called Photoshop, and makeup is used to conceal everything from blemishes to scars, we never blink when we see an obviously doctored photograph.

We’re surrounded by so much fake beauty, do we know what’s real beauty anymore?

Although magazines such as Seventeen have pledged to use ‘real’ girls and not digitally enhance or alter a model’s body or shape, can we really change ideal notions of beauty?

“We’ve gotten used to the idea over the past 10 years or so that every single image we see in a magazine, particularly in women’s magazines, is going to be an altered, hyper-real, impossible idealized version of how that person actually looks,” she said.

- Greg Botelho

Besides, do models, complete with pockmarks, blemishes, scars, and uneven skin tones, sell products?

Keeping it ‘real’ is all good rhetoric until it interferes with business sensibilities.

Would you buy a facial cleanser promoted by a ‘real’ model who has all these flaws?

All the same, the reason why the Dove Campaign video is ever so poignant for me is that it’s authentic. It promotes the importance of self-respect and self-importance. It’s about keeping it real in a plastic, digitally enhanced, doctored world.

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