Choose beautiful. Chances are you may have read about or seen Dove’s new advertising campaign encouraging women to choose beautiful over average. It was undoubtedly borne out of a noble desire to make customers – existing and potential – feel better about themselves.
Dove has a history of creating advertisements around this objective. In 2004 Unilever, the parent company of Dove, launched its Real Beauty campaign which focused on challenging the stereotypes around a woman’s appearance and ‘beauty’.
Unlike many other skincare or beauty brands, Dove’s marketing material does showcase women of various shapes, skin colours and ages. That this strategy is motivated by a very real commercial objective doesn’t negate the fact that there is some social utility in depicting a more diverse array of women in advertisements.
In short, Dove has some form in promoting a slightly wider definition of beauty, albeit from the narrow starting point of promoting beauty products.
When I received an envelope last week encouraging me to “choose beautiful” and share an image of myself declaring this choice on social media, I didn’t. I was hesitant but couldn’t exactly explain why.
The next morning I stumbled across a rather brilliant piece on News.com that radio host Jo Stanley had penned on her own reaction to the campaign. She characterised her writing as a rant, I say that sells her astute observations far too short. She wrote:
“Why do I need to see myself as Beautiful? If you didn’t ask me, I might not even have ever thought to put myself in that context. Thanks for bringing it up, now here comes the negative self-talk all over again. And you’re only giving me a choice between Beautiful and Average? If I don’t choose either what do I do? Pace outside the building like a vampire on True Blood, waiting to be invited in?
I need other doors, other options. Where’s the Funny doorway? Or Clever or Compassionate? Why can’t I #ChooseStrong? Or #ChooseExcellentListener? When are we going to value qualities we can strive for and that will benefit others, rather than aesthetic qualities we were lucky enough to be born with and that really only benefit ourselves?”
Thank you Jo. That is exactly why I wasn’t enamoured with the choice. There is value in encouraging women to be less critical about their own appearance. How many women wake up of a morning and declare themselves to be beautiful? My guess is very few.
But why do so many women wake up and care how they look in the first place? It’s at least partly because girls and women are told constantly – subliminally and directly – that their worth is intrinsically tied into how they look. That’s why asking women to choose between beautiful and average is a zero-sum game. It simply reinforces the notion that beauty is paramount.
In a technical sense plenty of us are average; very few people are ‘beautiful‘. But that’s no cause for despair because beyond our external appearance – however we perceive it – is where the fun lies. That’s where we can choose bold, or funny, or driven, or kind, or helpful. We can choose ambitious, loyal, brave, active, strong, smart, savvy, confident, lively, vibrant. And none of them are mutually exclusive.
UK feature writer Judith Woods touched on another salient point about #ChooseBeautiful in The Telegraph.
“But we must always remember that while men and women are indisputably equal, they are not the same. For a start, no male-orientated advertising campaign would ever feature doorways marked “Handsome” and “Average”.
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But my abiding hope is that, in the future, if my daughters ever see actual or metaphorical signs like these, they won’t panic or have a personal crisis. Instead, they’ll simply climb up, pull them down and nonchalantly trample them underfoot as they continue on their way.”
Sounds good to me. What do you think?