The Campaign for Real Beauty

Dove is trying to do something really remarkable. They’re making calculated attempts to change the way people define beauty. At first, I thought it was a stupid marketing gimmick, but after digging around their website, I’ve now concluded that they’re making a worthwhile effort to change the world for the better. Still, I’m skeptical that they will achieve success. More problematically, I believe their efforts are misguided.

Dove states their goal as follows: “Dove's global Campaign for Real Beauty aims to change the status quo and offer in its place a broader, healthier, more democratic view of beauty. A view of beauty that all women can own and enjoy everyday.” The thrust of the movement is to redefine beauty through open dialogue, academic research, truthful advertising, and self-esteem workshops for girls. In the end, they hope that more women will see themselves as ‘beautiful.’

Their global research to date has some interesting findings. First, only 2% of women describe themselves as ‘beautiful.’ Women are far more apt to choose ‘natural’ (31%), ‘average’ (25%), ‘attractive’ (9%), ‘feminine’ (8%), ‘good looking’ (7%), ‘cute’ (7%), or ‘pretty’ (5%). Of the 12 labels studied, Beauty was 5^th from the bottom, trumping ‘sophisticated,’ ‘sexy,’ and ‘stunning’ each at 1% and ‘gorgeous’ at 0%. I presume that the ‘more democratic’ definition of beauty to which Dove aims will change some of those votes from average, attractive, and cute to beautiful.

As I see it, there are two ways to get this done. First, you can keep ‘beautiful’ at the top of the spectrum and more convince girls that they belong there. This method is not healthy, I don’t believe, and involves self-deception. Everyone can’t be at the top and to think otherwise is to fool oneself. The other option is to bring the word ‘beautiful’ down to the middle. But even this is an exercise in semantics and has less to do with self-esteem than it does with changing the English language. And if this is the goal, rather than change the definition of beauty to mean average, wouldn’t it be easier to just invent a new word, say Dovelicious? Neither strategy will make young women like themselves more. Why can’t cute and pretty be good enough? I, for one, prefer it.

The study also seemed to take exception to the fact that 60% of American women (47% worldwide) thought their weight was too high. It glossed over the finding that 62% of American women are actually overweight. They study was not designed to determine what percent of the 62% were actually overweight. Still, it highlights the problem with simply making people believe that they’re beautiful. Rather than convincing medically overweight people to describe themselves as beautiful, everyone would be better off if we encouraged them to live more healthy lifestyles. I believe that would be a more worthwhile campaign.

The most troubling finding was how women define the components of beauty. 89% believe happiness to be an attribute, 86% say kindness, 83% confidence, 81% dignity, 78% humor, 75% intelligence, 72% wisdom, 67% appearance of skin, 64% overall physical appearance, and 62% say facial appearance. Why is this troubling? Well, the study using this finding to ‘demonstrates that “beauty” is seen by women as richer and more complex than the physical ideals that dominate popular culture.’ The study seems to think this is a good thing. It would be, except for the fact that only 2% of women consider themselves beautiful! That’s really sad. That 2% of women consider themselves to have outer beauty isn’t a huge deal (to me at least), but if only 2% of women consider themselves to have INNER beauty, that’s a major social problem.

What little girls really need to hear is that beauty is not important, that society will love you for being intelligent, kind, and dignified. They need to hear that despite the fact that society does not do a good job engendering these qualities, if you can cultivate them yourself, from the inside out, society will embrace you. But until we can promise and deliver these things, any such campaign to make more people beautiful is doomed from the start. But as it is right now, every year, the world spends as much on hair care products and make up alone as the US spends on education nationwide. Throw in other beauty expenses and it's not even close. Change begins with people's pocketbooks.