Navigate Reading slides 88-89, As other people see you
1. Dove, the beauty company famous for its campaigns to make people feel better about themselves, have created the most interesting film they’ve ever done.
2. For the film Dove, Real Beauty Sketches, they asked a group of women to turn up to a place hadn’t been to before, and then make friends with another woman there. They were later asked to go into a room and describe their own faces, honestly, to a complete stranger who was hidden behind a curtain: police artist, Gil Zamora. All the women were very negative about their appearance. They used phrases like “round face” and “big forehead”. Once the sketch was done, Zamora thanked them and they left.
3. Next, each woman was asked back into the room to describe to Zamora the face of the woman they had made friends with. Already, you get the idea of what Dove was trying to prove; the descriptions were so much more positive. A “protruding jaw”, for example, was described as a “nice and thin chin”.
4. When the two sketches were done, Zamora put them side by side and asked the women back in to take a look at both pictures, revealing the sketches from the women’s descriptions of themselves, and the sketches the strangers had helped him to draw.
5. The difference between the two sketches in every case is incredible. Looking at her self-described portrait, one woman described her face as “a lot more closed off and fatter, sadder, too,” while her second one “looks much friendlier and happier.”
6. “We spend a lot of time as women trying to fix the things that aren’t quite right, and we should spend more time appreciating the things we do like,” she goes on. “We seem to feel less beautiful than other people think we are.”
7. “Do you think you’re more beautiful than you say?” Zamora asks one woman. “Yes,” she admits.
8. This is one campaign that will make you think, and hopefully, feel far more beautiful.
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