Camera Shy: Dove wins big in Cannes with newest Real Beauty ad

Dove - 'Camera Shy' from Epoch London on Vimeo.

Dove, a beauty company that used to be known for the purity of its soap, has become synonymous with its popular advertising campaigns aimed at boosting women’s self esteem.

Earlier this year, Dove hit a PR home run with its Real Beauty Sketches, a commercial that attempted to show how women judge themselves more harshly than everyone else. They achieved this by employing a forensic artist separated by a curtain to blindly draw women’s own descriptions of themselves and contrast that with the description a stranger provided to the same artist afterward.

While many were moved by the message, the campaign received its share of backlash from those who found it cloying and disingenuous. After all, Dove wants you to buy their soap. Dove is owned by the same company that produces Axe Body Spray and its roster of ads that suggest women are human-like objects governed by the irresistible scent of cheap aerosol musk.

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If this were a campaign produced by a non-profit organization devoted to non-denominational self-esteem perhaps that would be a different kettle of retail-price fish. But it isn’t.

So with its latest award-winning video spot, Dove has landed in the headlines again. Camera Shy, which explores why women hate being photographed as they get older, recently won a Cannes Gold Lion Film Award at this year’s festival.

In the ad, the camera cuts to more than a dozen attractive women who find various ways to hide their face from what we later learn is a roving camera.

The ad’s punchline comes at the end, when we see little girls hamming it up for the lens, reminding us that we used to love being immortalized on film. “When did you stop thinking you were beautiful?” Dove asks.

Well, we could start with the time when young girls suddenly become aware of beauty advertising and start to compare, even unconsciously, the airbrushed images of female perfection to their own growing, wonderfully imperfect physical form. Pile on a heap of hormonal confusion and peer pressure and you have the opposite of a fun time.

Or as a commenter on Jezebel sharply notes, “When did you stop thinking you were beautiful? Curiously, it's around the time I was old enough to notice advertising for beauty products, Dove. But go ahead, why don't you tell me how my underarms need your product to be held to a standard that I didn't know existed until you told me?”

Whether we like it or not, women are still judged far more harshly than men on physical appearance and it’s pretty hard not to internalize those expectations. Photos can become the physical documentation of all our perceived flaws, then, and thanks to social media sharing, these photos now get proliferated for everyone’s viewing pleasure – or scrutiny.

If you’re hard enough on yourself as it is, that’s not a comforting prospect.

So whether you legitimately fall into the un-photogenic category or you simply have hang-ups that get magnified by the spectre of photography, it’s no wonder that many women don’t exactly enjoy having a camera shoved in their face all the time.

On the other hand, and contrary to what Dove suggests, the spectacular quantity of selfies posted to Instagram these days demonstrates that a fair portion of the female population has no problem being photographed and presenting themselves for public scrutiny. Repeatedly. In bikinis.

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But one Vogue writer offers a different perspective; one that finds value in the messaging Dove so successfully serves up on a Gold Lion-winning platter.

When Sandra Ballentine was sorting through boxes of old snapshots, the photo-averse woman came to a surprising realization.

“Not only did I have to admit that I had pretty good legs when I was 28 (okay, maybe I shouldn’t have shown them off quite so brashly at Royal Ascot that year), but there it was staring back at me: overwhelming evidence of a well-lived and well-loved life. It wasn’t always pretty, perhaps. But it’s been pretty beautiful,” she writes.

Whether you find Dove’s ads gimmicky or genuine, Ballentine’s reaction shows there’s some value if you can start to see yourself in a healthier way. Not as a beauty queen, because that’s completely unimportant, but as someone whose life deserves documenting – even if you’re having a bad hair day.

What do you think? Corporate manipulation or an important tool toward female self-esteem? Sound off in the comments section below.