Real Beauty, Really Dove? |
Columnist Meghan Daum expresses her opinion on Dove’s “Real Beauty Sketches,” a social experiment where women compared their self-degrading descriptions with stranger’s flattery compliments. By utilizing sarcasm and casual language, and explicitly including her perspective, Daum gives off a sardonic tone. She first degrades Dove by referring to them as the “Dove soap people,” implying that Dove portrays qualities that forsake their credibility as a company. She also deems them hypocritical because the self-love ads do not correlate well with their cellulite cream. If people try to accept their cellulite as unique additions instead of flaws, how can Dove campaign for self-love when their cream encourages their audience to remove cellulite?
Daum also uses a sarcastic allusion by saying, “The subject could look like Ursula the Sea Witch from ‘Little Mermaid’ and the operative phrases would still be ‘smooth purple skin’ and ‘shapely tentacles.’” This emphasizes how she views the experiment as fabricated. Of course people will highlight a stranger’s beautiful aspects—it’s common courtesy! She includes how professional commentariat deemed the participants “too young, thin, and light-skinned to represent ‘real.’” If the subjects were already the common ideal of beauty, Daum feels that they cannot represent all women. She seems very disturbed by the entire advertisement, and she even points out that "the problem with being told you're more beautiful than you think is still being told that beauty matters a lot." Beauty should not rest at the center of everyone’s ideals. If we teach people to focus solely on beauty, they will disregard other necessary characteristics like—gee, I don’t know—being kind and compassionate towards other people. |