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In its latest commercial, or how Dove also calls it, a ‘social experiment’, the company tries to prove that beauty is a choice. It makes women from around the world choose between two doors, one of which is labelled ‘beautiful’ and the other one ‘average’. You can see in the video that most women are unsure which door to walk through.
The idea for this campaign originated back in 2004 when a Dove study revealed that “only 4% of women around the world consider themselves beautiful”, the rest 96% would describe themselves as ‘average’.
One of the reasons for this is that from an early age girls are being forced to aim for unrealistic and unattainable perceptions of beauty that they see in magazines and on the TV. These standards of beauty are extremely narrow and the point of the campaign was to highlight this fact.
But in spite of the very positive ‘official’ message of this campaign which is that everyone is beautiful in their own way, this commercial has spiked controversy. Some argue that the ‘two-doors dilemma’ approach is very shallow and made women feel bad about themselves.
One of the women from the video later shared her thoughts: ‘I walked in the door that said ‘average’ and I didn’t feel really good after that because obviously I had rated myself average’.
So what do you think, does this campaign encourage women to see themselves as beautiful? What door would you choose?
