For the last 20 years, Dove has been running a campaign called “Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty”. This campaign is meant to inspire women and children to feel and be confident in their own bodies. As a part of this campaign, Dove released a film, in April of 2024, to comment on how the rise of AI will affect women’s and young children’s self-esteem. This film used AI to generate images of “a gorgeous woman”, “perfect skin”, and “the most beautiful woman in the world”. The images that were generated reflected some of the dominant ideologies that we deem as the beauty standards in the Western world. Blue eyes, blonde hair, fair complexion, just to name a few.
However, Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty aims to do the opposite. Following the AI-generated images of these different types of women, the film asked AI to generate the same phrases, however; with the addition of “according to Dove’s real beauty”. The images that were generated consisted of a diverse and inclusive group of women. It ranged from women with disabilities to women with imperfect skin. And at the end of this film, Dove states, “Dove will never use AI to create or distort women’s images”.
While I appreciate the sentiment Dove is trying to make with this advert, I can’t help but be skeptical of brands and their intentions behind marketing campaigns like these. As someone who identifies as a womanist, I tend to always look at the intersectionality in one’s activism. And in this case, while they have intersectional representation, I still feel as though it falls victim to the visibility and commodity of popular feminism.
In her book, Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny, Sarah Benet-Weiser describes popular feminism as, “tinker[ing] on the surface, embracing a palatable feminism, encouraging individual girls and women to just be empowered”. Rather than challenging the issues that women face when it comes to their self-image and self-confidence, Dove encourages a more digestible version of feminism.
“Popular feminism and its exhortations to simply have more women in various cultural, political, and economic realms is similar to liberal efforts to include people of color within a widened field of whiteness, one that continues to shape representation, work, and politics without interrogating the racism that forms the bound aries of whiteness from the ground up”.
Sarah Benet-Weiser
Dove is promoting a very corporate-friendly version of feminism that we often see in the world of capitalism. They’re essentially saying their products are for all women regardless of what they look like. However, the ad wasn’t created to disrupt capitalism or mainstream politics but to attract everyday women to their products. It also continues to align a woman’s value and empowerment with their beauty. While I don’t necessarily agree with Dove’s ad, I do understand why some believe this type of advertising is important. If women’s bodies are going to be intrinsically linked to their beauty, then redefining what beauty means is important and necessary.
Where I believe the most disconnect and hypocrisy lies between Dove and their parent company, Unilever. Not only is Unilever profiting off of Dove’s Real Beauty campaign, but they also own other brands, such as Axe, Slimfast, and Fair and Lovely, a skin-brightening cream. All of these brands profit off of the hypersexuality and insecurities of women. In Daniel O’Donnell’s case study, he reported the Campaign for a Commerical-Free Childhood (CCFC) found it “unfair for Unilever to profit from the sexy tone and expression of its Axe ads while at the same time benefiting from the positive publicity garnered by Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty”.
While continuing to redefine beauty is important to the conversation of feminism, I think it is important to continue to critique these advertisements and brands in redefining a woman’s value from her beauty to other non-physical qualities. I believe it is also important to look at their parent companies and urge them to make a change in the brands they support and profit from.