Dove discovers: women not thin
Dove has launched a new ad campaign featuring six “real” women.* These women are all beautiful in very accessible, average ways, and they have great bodies in very accessible, average ways. The U.S. campaign follows on the heels of a successful ad series in the U.K. that followed the same formula.
The whole concept isn’t all that new — The Body Shop ran a series of advertisements featuring a Rubenesque doll named Ruby and slogans like “There are 3 billion women in the world who don’t look like supermodels and only 8 who do,” that got Mattel all itchy and litigious several years ago.
While I don’t really like Dove products all that much (I am partial to Feto Soap and, well, The Body Shop), I hope the campaign is successful. Otherwise, it will just be further confirmation that American women, who average 5′4″ in height and 155 lbs., are a pack of self-loathing neurotics in love with unattainable images they purport to hate.
*Real meaning “not professional models,” since professional models are apparently engineered in labs or something.