Dove, the company famous for its “99 percent pure” soap, launched the “Campaign for Real Beauty”, an ad campaign designed to challenge unrealistic images of women in advertising. One ad features a curvy young woman, and poses the question “over-sized or outstanding?”. It invites women to go to the Dove website to cast their vote and join the company in its “search for a wider definition of beauty” and in its efforts to “inspire women to celebrate themselves.”
Unlike most mass media images of beauty that we see, the Dove campaign includes women of colour, women over 40 and women who weigh more than 100 pounds. The campaign has won accolades for its social conscience, including in the feminist pop culture magazine Bitch.

Love our Natural Body, less the cellulite – Use Dove

On a deeper thoughts, there is much contradiction in this “Campaign for Real Beauty”. While the website and the ads are of “real women” who are proud of their “real curves,” the actual goal of the campaign is to convince women to buy “Dove Firming”: a product designed to reduce the appearance of cellulite in two weeks.

Well, guess what Dove – real women have cellulite.

Fat is beauty – I mean your Purse..

Although the campaign presents more realistic role models for women than is the norm, the central message remains the same. Beauty is not something that comes naturally to women: it requires endless effort, as well as the purchase of various products designed to change or hide women’s problem areas. The “real” in real beauty should be in quotes.

Dove aside, we are constantly inundated with mass media images of the so-called ideal that we must hope to achieve to be beautiful. In film, magazines, ads and television, the image of this ideal is invariably that of a white, affluent, stick-figure woman with large breasts and glamor.

Up the Cups, shrink the Waistline

The weight of today’s fashion model is 25 percent below that of ordinary women. Few of us will ever achieve such proportions, nor should we if we want to be healthy and happy. Given that the images we now see of today’s fashion models were likely digitally altered, the beauty ideal has become so far from possible that it must be computer generated.

The impossibility of attaining these ideals has not stopped women from doing considerable harm to themselves in the attempt. For example, feminists have long drawn a link between unrealistic beauty ideals and the rise of eating disorders. In a quest for thinness, women starve themselves, vomit, have their stomachs stapled, their jaws wired shut and fat sucked out.

Natural is beauty. Enhancements make you gorgeous

Not only are we told that we are too fat, but we are also told that everything else about our bodies needs improvement. Media images teach us that we need to inject collagen into our lips because they are too thin. We’re told to inject botox into our faces to freeze nerve endings and iron out wrinkles. The loss of the ability to show emotion with our faces is a small price to pay for beauty. Our teeth are not white enough, nor is our skin, our eyes are not blue enough, our hair is not shiny or straight enough, nothing we do is ever enough.

Despite gains made since the rise of the women’s movement, the pressure on women today to adhere to beauty standards may be even greater than it was 30 years ago. And the standards are not only more difficult to meet, but the targets for this pressure are even younger now that the beauty industry has discovered the profit to be made from the so-called “tweens”, young girls just about to enter their teenage years. The greater accessibility and circulation of mass media means that the influence of beauty ideals has broadened both geographically and across classes.

“Real” Beauty is all but a Conspiracy

There is considerable and increasing profit to be made from convincing women that their value lies in their appearance. Since there is greater pressure on women than on men to be beautiful, the fashion industry can make women pay more than men for the same consumer goods such as clothing, hair care products and haircuts. Each year in the US, approximately $40 billion dollars is spent on the diet industry including diet books, diet foods, diet programs and weight-loss gimmicks. According to the American Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, the overall number of cosmetic procedures has increased 228 percent since 1997. One-third of cosmetic surgery patients are between the ages of 35 and 40, 22 percent are between the ages of 26 and 34. Eighteen percent of people getting cosmetic surgery are under the age of 25.

Cosmetic surgery is increasingly affordable for middle-income earners, and as such more women have access to breast implants, nose jobs and other cosmetic modifications. Now that many procedures cost roughly the price of a used car, industry commentators have lauded the “democratization” of beauty. Makeover shows of the past, which improved the appearance of the show’s participants with makeup and new haircuts, have been replaced with a new breed of reality shows that transform apparently ugly women into beauties with massive and invasive surgical procedures. Reality shows such as “I Want a Famous Face” have drastically upped the ante. Now we can actually look like the women on the film screens.

For most of us, our interactions with these images of ideal female beauty are deeply personal and individualized. As feminists, we do not engage with beauty images uncritically. But few of us are untouched. Not only must we wrestle with our low self-esteem because of our bad body image, but we also struggle with feelings of guilt that we actually care what people think about our appearance.

But the impact of these images is not only personal. The dictates of the beauty industry are connected to the social oppression of women. That old feminist slogan still rings true. The personal is political. It is time to call the beauty industry and the practices it advocates for what it is – a form of gendered violence and oppression.

By Jackie Esmonde