Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

A Beauty Campaign’s Ugly Reality

As part of the war against negative body image, activists have tried to shift conversations toward recognizing that everyone is beautiful. Thin girls, fat girls, black girls, white girls — we’re all beautiful.

The soap company Dove launched its “Campaign for Real Beauty” a few years ago in this same spirit. The idea is that the company is washing away the makeup or the Photoshop alterations and showing the raw beauty of American women, whether they have C-section scars, love handles or A-cup bras. While others have called out Dove for the lack of diversity in these ads and videos, the company’s most recent video, “Dove Real Beauty Sketches,” reveals a deeper problem inherent in the campaign itself.

In the video, a forensic sketch artist draws women he could not see as they described themselves. The women, all of who seem to be deeply self-conscious, give him what are supposed to overly harsh descriptions of themselves. “My mom told me I had a big jaw.” “I kind of have a fat, rounder face.”

Then, the artist brings in a person who had met one of the women only a little while before to describe the women. At the end of the video, the women see both portrayals — one based on their own perceptions and the other based on how others view them — and are floored by the concrete representation of how distorted their body images can be. There are tears and declarations of a need for increased self-love.

“Do you think you’re more beautiful than you say?” the artist asks one woman as she looks at two very different portraits. She replies with a yes. Another woman, when talking about her beauty, says, “It impacts the choices and the friends that we make, the jobs we apply for, our children — it impacts everything.”

There’s the problem. There is certainly something to be said about the importance of fostering self-esteem. And that woman is correct — the confidence you have in yourself does affect every aspect of your life: the way you present yourself in a job interview, the comments you make to your children. But the answer to this problem is not to just tell women that they really are beautiful, even if they can’t see it. Instead, we have to stop thinking that beauty is so important at all and emphasize that this essential confidence needs to come from other places.

Not everyone is beautiful. It’s a simple fact of aesthetics, genetic luck and cultural trends, a statement no different than saying that not everyone is smart or athletic or funny. Yes, people appreciate different kinds of beauty, but not everyone is beautiful. The fact that some see this as a controversial statement is a testament to how we overvalue beauty — especially the beauty of women.

We live in a society that scrutinizes whether a female politician is wearing makeup, in which tabloids obsess over celebrities’ ability to gain and lose weight, and studies have proven that women who don’t wear makeup to work are considered unprofessional. Little girls are told they’re beautiful instead of that they’re nice, smart or fast. Rather than try to redefine the way our society values beauty, Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign and similar efforts, while undoubtedly inspired by good intentions, only perpetuate standards of what a woman “should” be — beautiful. They are still saying that being beautiful is important and necessary, even if they’re trying to open up what the definition of what beauty is.

Women should feel comfortable in their own skin, and society should reconsider what it values as attractive and desirable. But telling someone that her face isn’t as fat or that her nose isn’t as prominent as she thinks does not do that. It’s still privileging thinness and youth as the only acceptable and desirable standards of beauty. It’s still saying that it matters whether or not a woman is beautiful. There’s nothing revolutionary about that.

I, like many women, enjoy being complimented on my looks, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But I appreciate being complimented on my writing or being told that I’m a good friend or receiving a positive comment from a professor much more than I like being told that my hair looks good. We need to make women — and men — realize that a woman’s beauty is one of the least important things about her. Ugly men go unchallenged, but ugly women are disrespected, mocked and dehumanized. Campaigns like Dove’s do nothing to change that.

As Tina Fey said in her memoir, “Bossy Pants,” “Always remember the most important rule of beauty, which is: Who cares?”

It’s time we stop caring.

VICTORIA EDEL is a junior in the College and managing editor of The Hoya.  beauty

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