Dove turns attention to heavily edited selfies in latest campaign

Dove has extended its fight against unnatural beauty standards in a new hard-hitting campaign from Ogilvy—this time, turning to social media activism.

With harm to the self-esteem of women and girls at the top of the agenda, the Unilever brand has vowed to play a role in tackling heavily edited selfies.The focal point of the new campaign, "Reverse selfie", is a 60-second film that features an image a young woman has posted on social media.

The ad shows the image reversing from one of a made-up woman, with perfectly coiffed hair, fuller lips and rounded eyes, to one of a young girl, revealing the natural beauty beneath. On-screen text reads: “The pressure of social media is harming our girls’ self-esteem. Let’s reverse the damage.” It then points viewers to a subsite, dove.com/confidence.

The campaign was created by copywriter Alison Steven and art director Liam Bushby, and directed by Benito Montorio through Independent.

This latest work acts as a sequel to Dove's 2006 campaign "Evolution", which depicted the evolution of a woman, edited to fit the unrealistic standards of the advertising industry.

Alessandro Manfredi, executive vice-president at Dove, said: “Now that social media has grown to be part of our everyday lives, digital distortion is happening more than ever and tools once only available to the professionals can now be accessed by young girls at the touch of a button without regulation.

“Girls all around the world have begun to feel the pressure to edit and distort how they look, to create something ‘perfect’, which cannot be achieved in real life. “Dove wants to change this by highlighting this issue and providing free tools for parents and carers, to help the kids in their lives navigate social media in a positive way."

The star of the campaign, Grace, was chosen due to her real-life experiences of distorting her own images online using the retouching app featured in the clip.