Beauty Has a Dirty Secret

By now, nearly everyone in America has seen at least one of Dove’s Campaign For Real Beauty ads – either the print ads featuring a 96 year old woman with the caption, “Wrinkled?  Wonderful?”, the frisky TV spots featuring young women of various sizes and shapes prancing about in their underwear, or the absolutely heart wrenching commercial showing little girls who wish they looked somehow different.

The Campaign For Real Beauty is genius. Sylvia Lagnado, Dove’s global brand director, went to enormous work and expense to justify Dove’s approach. Partnering with the research firm Strategy/One and Dr. Susie Orbach, they launched a study of over 3000 women from 10 countries to determine how women see themselves – too fat, too tall, attractive, or stunning. Not surprisingly, only 2% of women surveyed considered themselves beautiful. Only 9% of women even feel comfortable describing themselves as attractive. Wow!

So here I am blogging about all the different ways women can improve on their appearances, and feeling more than slightly guilty thinking I might be adding to our national obsession with meeting the media’s standard for beauty through any means possible.

However, I have re-considered my position – or maybe just found an effective way to defend myself.  The Dove study revealed some very good news – that women really do see beauty as something that is more internal than external. It’s about attitude, spirit and happiness. I couldn’t agree more, but I also believe that feeling good about the way you look on the outside adds immeasurably to how you feel about yourself on the inside. Not so much from a standardized perception of beauty, but from looking like you are taking good care of yourself, staying youthful in mind and body, looking in the mirror and thinking, “this is the best I can be on every level”.

I definitely don’t want my 14 year old daughter to measure herself against Hillary Duff. Frankly I find my daughter far more interesting to look at than Hillary Duff. And I would certainly be foolish to compare myself to Goldie Hawn, but I know from years of experience in the business world that customers – and the world in general -respond to you more positively if you are attractive, contemporary and full of confidence.

Dove has uncovered our national “dirty little secret:" We worship physical perfection in our society to a point where we have jeopardized our children’s self esteem and allowed ourselves to treat groups we consider wholly unattractive with the same discrimination as racial bias or religious intolerance. 

But Dove’s products are designed to help us look as physically attractive as possible. We all need that. We need to be the best we can be inside AND out. I urge everyone to read the Dove study on their Web site and tell them how much we appreciate what they are doing to help the women of the world feel and look beautiful.

Comments

[Gwynne Chesher]

I keep hearing about all of the "work" that women are having done, but when I look around the streets, the malls and even resorts, I see young girls who go overboard with the make up and sexy clothes and about 85% of the women over thirty, apparently think that jeans and a t-shirt qualify as "dressed-up" and that anything under 300 lbs. is just pleasantly plump. We have a self esteem problem, here that no amount of plastic surgery is going to fix.