Figure 1
Note. From “The lasting genius of Dove’s ‘Real Beauty,’ and the formal daring of Jeep’s ‘Portraits’,” by T. Nudd, 2016, Adweek. https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/lasting-genius-doves-real-beauty-and-formal-daring-jeeps-portraits-174095/
It is a daily struggle to be a woman and deal every day with thoughts about how your body looks, if it is enough, or if you need to improve it to fit into a society where thin and slim bodies are still the beauty standard. These expectations are present everywhere, especially in advertising and media, where certain body types have historically been promoted as the “ideal.”
For me, this has been a personal struggle since I was a kid. I grew up going to diets and nutritionists, and many times people were looking at me or judging what I was eating. At that time I didn’t fully understand it, but now as an adult I realize that food was also an emotional escape for me. I used to look at models like Gigi Hadid or Blake Lively because they are tall like me, and I thought that maybe I could look like them. However, as a Latina I naturally have hips, which sometimes gives my body a different shape that I cannot really change.
Over the years I eventually reached the body I thought I always wanted. I became very skinny, but that moment also made me realize something important. I was constantly counting calories, worrying about every meal, and sometimes even preferring to stay hungry instead of eating more, all just to maintain that thin image. That was when I understood that my relationship with my body and food was not healthy.
With time, I started to heal that relationship. Instead of focusing only on being skinny, I began working out and lifting weights. Now my goal is not to look weak or extremely thin, but to become stronger and reflect on the outside the strength that I feel inside. Weightlifting helped me see my body in a different way. Of course, there are still days when I remember how skinny I was last year and part of me wishes I looked like that again. But I also understand that those thoughts come from years of pressure and trauma related to beauty standards.
Because of experiences like this, many people have started questioning the way beauty is represented in advertising. One campaign that tried to challenge these traditional standards was the Dove Real Beauty Campaign, launched in 2004. Instead of using only professional models, the campaign showed women with different body shapes, ages, and backgrounds, promoting the idea that beauty exists in many forms.
However, this campaign also created another discussion. According to Murray (2013), Dove’s campaign can also be understood through the concept of commodity feminism, which refers to the way companies use messages about empowerment and confidence as part of their marketing strategies. In other words, the campaign promotes body positivity and self-acceptance, but it is also still connected to selling beauty products.
Because of this, Dove’s campaign can be seen in two ways. On one side, it helped normalize more diverse representations of women in advertising. On the other side, it also shows how brands can incorporate social ideas into their branding. This makes campaigns like Dove interesting to analyze, because they show how visual representation, culture, and marketing are closely connected.
Reference
Murray, D. P. (2013). Branding “real” social change in Dove’s Campaign
for Real Beauty. Feminist Media Studies, 13(1), 83–101.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263420082_Branding_Real_
Social_Change_in_Dove's_Campaign_for_Real_Beauty
Nudd, T. (2016, October 17). The lasting genius of Dove’s “Real Beauty,” and the formal
daring of Jeep’s “Portraits”. Adweek.
| https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/lasting-genius-doves-real-beauty-an
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