Beauty and the Fleeced: Reading Doves Choose Beautiful Campaign

The standards of beauty are constantly challenged and revisited over time. The media, through advertisements and commercials, plays a vital role in constructing and communicating contemporary ideas of beauty. In their efforts to empower women across the globe, Dove initiated a social experiment called �Choose Beautiful� in which women in five different cities (San Francisco, London, New Delhi, Shanghai, and Sao Paulo) were given the choice to walk through one of the two available doors labeled as �beautiful� and �average�. This experiment put many of the research subjects in a dilemmatic situation of choosing between the two labels. In hindsight, this campaign was an interesting academic discourse because it did not merely promote new standards of beauty or cement the existing standards as other advertisements did. Rather, it prompted a more fundamental discussion on the elusive concept of beauty and its implications on women. This descriptive qualitative research examines the campaign and its undertone within the frameworks of lookism and the existing concepts of beauty. This research concludes that despite the seemingly good intentions, the Choose Beautiful campaign is a somewhat patronizing attempt to compartmentalize women into the precarious pool of feeling beautiful.