Dove’s new #ChooseBeautiful Campaign has sparked some heat on the internet. And I love the conversation that has grown out of it. Obviously, it’s main intention is to be a marketing deploy, but I really enjoy the topic it has brought up. It stirs up conversation that we has women need to have. The campaign revolved around real women having to choose between entering one of two doors–one marked “Beautiful” and the other “Average.” As I watched the video, my heart sank when I saw women hesitate and choose to walk through the average door. I even got teary eyed hearing that the reason some of these women choose average was because they didn’t see themselves as beautiful.
One of the qualms that people are having with this new campaign is that “…Dove [is] only focusing on beauty, it seems as if this is a marketing campaign, which, at the end of the day, it is” wrote Desiree Pharias of State Press. “For Dove to make the change that it is seeking out, it needs to add in more in-depth campaigns that will make women think of their other admirable traits.” And they expressed that a more viable campaign would have had door options for Funny, Creative, Kind, or Intelligent. And I agree, this would have definitely opened it up for more positive choices to be made. Although I don’t think it would have brought up this conversation around beauty, or point out, there is still something very wrong with the way we view beauty.
I think the word beautiful has many connotations attached to it. To some people its a word that doesn’t describe them and its an unreachable attribute, to some its a superficial word that shouldn’t be use to describe a woman, and to others it a word that holds a lot more meaning to it than depicted in media. I definitely fall into the last category. Let’s look at the definition of beauty:
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