Hips Feel Good

It is no secret that today’s society defines beauty as thin, long-legged women with statuesque bodies. Examples are found everywhere just by glancing at the closest magazine ads or by scrolling down the latest fashion article online. Normal, everyday women are being forgotten and tossed aside to make room for the “Top-Model”-like women currently crowding up Hollywood. Media depicts women as an unattainable image. They pressure ladies to buy the products they’re advertising; luring them with false advertisements promising that with it, they too could be perfect. While the media portrays women in a certain way for advertising and marketing benefits, it has caused numerous negatives effects to women’s self-esteems nationwide, it contradicts

For women, advertising exemplifies the ideal female body. According to Kilbourne, young girls are taught from a very early age that they need to spend lots of time and money to achieve this “physical perfection.” But realistically this cannot be achieved. The ideal woman’s body is Caucasian, very skinny, big breasts, no flaws, and pretty much no pores. This cannot be achieved because it is physically impossible to look like this; the illusion comes from the secret world of Photoshop. No woman is beautiful enough so they leave it to technology to create perfection. The supermodel Cindy Crawford said, “I wish I looked like Cindy Crawford!” She knew the realities of Photoshop and body image, and more women and girls need to become aware of this as well.

Moreover, as Richins (1991) reports, women always make social comparisons between the advertising models and themselves. As a result, advertising images create negative affect and increases women’s dissatisfaction with their own appearance. Since those images are edited through the consistent usage of digital technology, these idealized images do not portray women in a healthy manner. Indeed, these enhanced images would give these young girls the impression that they need to be ‘perfect’, just like these ‘fake’ images. According to Reist in ABC’s Gruen Session (2010), ‘young women get the message that they need to be thin, hot and sexy just to be acceptable’ in this society. Therefore, by generating the wrong perception of real beauty, the responsibility is pushed to the marketers, as they portray women with this stereotypical body type as acceptable. In addition, as the brand, Dove’s tagline in its advertisement - What happened to the ‘real beauty’? (Reist, 2010), marketers need not market their products in manners portraying women as airheads. Consequently, marketers gave most consumers viewing the advertisement, the wrong impression that

This campaign is aimed at changing society’s warped perception of beauty and the stereotypical vision of what women should look like. They’ve completely disregarded the Barbie look and instead, feature plus size models and generally curvier women, all of different

Beauty standards are portrayed everywhere: on magazines, social media, ads, commercials, and even flaunted among peers. While the ideals are supposed to promote health awareness, fitness motivation, and self love, it unfortunately results in many unfavorable consequences. Women are constantly “penalized for not being beautiful and at the same time are stigmatized, even pathologized, for not feeling beautiful, for having low self-esteem, for engaging in behaviors like dieting and excessive exercising, or for having eating disorders” (Johnston and Taylor 954). Beauty standards are unrealistic and unhealthy to pursue, and misinforms the public on what true beauty is. While not all beauty image ideals promote negative feelings and dissatisfaction, many believe that the negative effects far outweighs any positive effects.

Beauty is for everyone. The commitment Dove makes to women across the world helps to form a bond between the consumer and the producer. This bond can also be better known as an argument which encompasses an ethos appeal. Women have come to trust and relate to Dove and therefore are more likely to recognize and purchase their products over other brands. When the world sees this commercial, they see an average american woman.

The Dictionary defines the word Beauty as “A beautiful person, especially a woman.” Nowhere in that definition does it suggest the woman is a size 0 with big breasts, flawless skin and high cheekbones. This is the message Dove is trying to send by creating “Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty”, to make women of all shapes, sizes, and color feel beautiful everyday. However, shortly after Dove released their first campaign, media columnists such as Richard Roeper and Lucio Guerrero were quick to reflect their “professional” opinions. After reviewing Jennifer L. Pozner’s article on Dove’s “Real Beauty” Backlash and the naïve comments these active media members have made, I found through

Dove gives the message ‘You are beautiful to way you are’ to all women to show that they are valuable. Also company tries to make women encouraged in order to believe what they say in their

Advertising uses a lot of different techniques to show the public the perfect female image. Body doubles and computer retouching are two examples of how advertisers are able to “doctor” images. The majority of women we see in magazines, music videos. and movies do not appear in reality, as we perceive them in the media. We may actually believe we are looking at one woman’s body when we are actually looking at sections of three or four women’s bodies, which, when spliced together, shows us the best parts of each women’s body as the final product. Women cannot attain these impossible standards of attractiveness. Young girls learn very quickly that they must spend much time, energy, and money on achieving these standards.

One will see a white female with pouting red lips and the very petite body that resembles a thirteen-year-old girl. The extremely artificial women and the heavily photo-shopped pictures in these ad’s create a norm and make those women who look differently, feel insecure of who they are and make them feel as if they are less of a woman, for example they tend to over represent the Caucasian, blonde with bright eyes, white complexion and a petite body. This is an unattainable beauty for most women, which has caused many to develop issues such as eating disorders, depression and the very much talked about these days, anorexia.

It 's not a mystery that society 's ideals of beauty have a drastic and frightening effect on women. Popular culture frequently tells society, what is supposed to recognize and accept as beauty, and even though beauty is a concept that differs on all cultures and modifies over time, society continues to set great importance on what beautiful means and the significance of achieving it; consequently, most women aspire to achieve beauty, occasionally without measuring the consequences on their emotional or physical being. Unrealistic beauty standards are causing tremendous damage to society, a growing crisis where popular culture conveys the message that external beauty is the most significant characteristic women can have. The approval of prototypes where women are presented as a beautiful object or the winner of a beauty contest by evaluating mostly their physical attractiveness creates a faulty society, causing numerous negative effects; however, some of the most apparent consequences young and adult women encounter by beauty standards, can manifest as body dissatisfaction, eating disorders that put women’s life in danger, professional disadvantage, and economic difficulty.

Perceptual interpretation is an important issue in this commercial. This is the main reason why it was not aired in the US, but in other markets across the world. This Dove Pro-Age campaign was aiming to change the perception of the way women viewed themselves. Many women, these days adhere to surgery or Botox to make them be perceivably better looking than their natural look. What this product line is trying to do is to allow women to see that they do not need any of those surgeries to make them be worthy and be considered beautiful in the society. The US media proposed that this ad campaign cannot be aired on network television because it showed too much skin, but I think that this is just a cover up. The media probably doesn’t want to alter the American viewpoint of beauty as of yet. They are still not up to the revolution of Dove’s viewpoint of beauty which is natural at a limitless age. In American society, the stereotype of beautiful women is portrayed to be slender, tall, and young; whom are all the women featured in ads such as Clean & Clear or Neutrogena. But Dove is trying to change that stereotype of beautiful women and make the statement that at any age and size you

The Dove campaign for Real Beauty was the brainchild of Ogilvy & Mathers, Edelman Public Relations and Harbinger Communications (to be referred to as simply Ogilvy) and the project was known as the “Evolution” campaign. The marketing campaign began in 2004 under the corporation known as Unilever. This diversified conglomerate is the parent company to the Dove Company’s line of beauty and body products. The campaign began as a result of survey conducted in which only 2% of women believed they were “beautiful.” Unilever saw an opportunity to reach a saturated market from a fresh perspective. After hiring Ogilvy, the message grew into one of the most successful advertising campaigns in Unilever’s storied history.

Dove had developed self-confidence work shops for women and girls, which are in line with its objective of maintaining the “Real Beauty” image. Using women from different ethnic background is also a good strategy for Dove to continue. This strategy welcomes international women differences and Dunleavy’s team gained a competitive advantage by using women of all shapes, sizes and color.

Many young women in today’s society struggle with confidence and their body image. This is a huge problem in society and many people have spoken out against the influence of media on women’s body image. However, it continues to be a major problem and more can always be done to raise awareness about societies unrealistic expectations for women’s beauty. Dove’s Choose Beautiful campaign was started to promote the self-esteem of women and encourage them to see their beauty, however there are some criticisms, including the company using this campaign to increase their sales. Dove is selling a product with the expectation that confident, beautiful women will purchase it, however people still have the ability to resist the ad industry.