Dove Pro-Age Campaign: Wrinkles, Rolls, and Real Beauty

This week's post takes a look at how the new Dove “Pro-Age” campaign is changing the way women are represented on television and in fashion magazines. Dove’s bold new advertisements portray nude women in their fifties flaunting their bodies and smiling for the camera. The ads, which are not retouched or airbrushed, promote the message that beauty comes in all colors and sizes, and encourage women to celebrate their age, not hide it. As part of their “Campaign for Real Beauty” Dove has created a video which can be found on You Tube, that exposes how photographs are digitally manipulated to create the deceptive images that millions of young girls see everyday in magazines. Below are my comments on two other blogs that also discuss the Dove Campaign. The first is Brilliant at Breakfast, a liberal blog that focuses predominantly on politics, and is written by a woman in her fifties. The second is Back in Skinny Jeans, a blog that aims to help young women feel good about themselves despite our cultural obsession with thinness and beauty.

My comment on Brilliant at Breakfast:

I completely agree with your statement that “When you read a magazine like this [Us Weekly], you wonder how on earth it is that celebrities define what beauty is in this country, because these magazines contain photo after photo of people who look so mind-bogglingly unattractive you wonder why anyone holds them up as a standard.” I think the reason for this phenomenon is that we are letting the media dictate to us what we think is beautiful and desirable. We have become so programmed to associate attractiveness with thinness that we are no longer making these decisions for ourselves. Our society is trained to think that “jutting collarbones, stick-thin arms, and bony ankles” symbolize beauty. Then every so often someone like Jennifer Hudson or American Ferrera comes along and reminds us to rethink the canon of beauty. Like you said, it does seem that there are very few Caucasian women behind the movement to be more “real;” but hopefully the trend will catch on and inspire women everywhere to celebrate their individual beauty.

My comment on Back in Skinny Jeans:

I think it is fantastic that Dove is celebrating women in their fifties as still being sexy and beautiful. It is refreshing to see something other than a twenty-one year old, blonde haired, pin-thin model selling something to me. Although I understand why Dove wanted the “Pro-Age” models to bare it all, I think it is unfortunate that the nudity has prevented the advertisements from airing on television where such a larger audience could have been reached. Also, on another note, I noticed that the campaign uses fewer African American models than Caucasian models and that most of these women are still quite thin. I even noticed some protruding collarbones, which brought to mind some of the scary thin models that we are both so tired of seeing in magazines. The Dove campaign is wonderful and inspiring, but unfortunately even “real beauty” isolates those who still do not possess the ideal traits that our society deems attractive. This is no flaw on the part of Dove, nor is this an easy problem to resolve, because as long as beauty is an important part of our culture, there will always be those who are considered attractive and those who suffer because they are not.