Starting in 2006, Dove began releasing ad campaigns geared toward supporting and building girls' self-esteem. Initially Dove's attempt to tackle issues of beauty and self-esteem among young girls and women was a refreshing look at beauty products for women. Dove not only launched self-esteem campaigns for girls, but also released a line of "pro-age" products, instead of the usual "anti-aging" beauty products already lining the shelves of every grocery store and pharmacy. While Dove's ad campaign seemed new and inspiring, it did not proceed without its flaws. Gunther Kress's chapter eight and nine of his book Multimodalities, offer theories of ensembles, orchestration, aesthetics and concepts of "learning" that help to uncover the negative aspects of Dove's Real Beauty campaign. Kress's theories paired with Gillian Rose's chapters nine and ten from Visual Methodologies, focusing on Stuart Hall's concept of encoding and ‘dominant code’, Gramsci's hegemony and counter-hegemony, and the use of visual images as objects, allow for a thorough analysis of Dove's ulterior motivations and slip-ups in their Real Beauty campaign.
Dove’s “A Dove Film” titled Evolution demonstrates the process of hair and make-up coupled with the powers of photoshop to create the glamorous girls displayed on billboards and magazine covers.
This time lapsed video lasts one minute and fifteen seconds, ending with the sentence “No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted”. As Kress states,
Orchestration describes the processes of selecting/assembling/designing the semiotic ‘materials’ which seem essential to meet the rhetor’s interests and which will be given shape as the semiotic entity … Orchestrations and the resultant ensembles can be organized in space and they can be organized in time, in sequence, in process, in motion (Kress 4374-82).
Dove’s interests, apparently, are helping expose the truth behind the “beauty” of women featured on billboards and magazines by selecting to film a young woman preparing for a photo shoot, assembling a time lapsed video detailing the strenuous process of hair and make-up and of the photoshop editing that contribute to creating “beautiful” women. It would seem that Dove’s interests are innocent and completely focused on restoring girls’ self-esteem and confidence in real beauty, yet their campaign for real beauty is still highly branded. The ensembles created during the Evolution video of excessive use of make-up, hair products and photoshop tools, are expertly organized in a space focused on the portrait of the young woman, careful to only show her face and not her full figure. Emphasizing the woman’s face, and not her body, allows Dove to explicitly comment on facial beauty, instead of body type or size. In this sense, Dove is able to maintain a campaign for “real” beauty, while cleverly excluding any opinion or suggestion on body type or size, suggesting that the distorted images of beauty are exclusively that of the face and nothing below the neck line. Having the woman sit in the centre of the shot, wearing apparently no make up, while proceeding to elaborate on the process involved in becoming “beautiful” through time lapsed, sequenced shots of the progression of her hair and make-up, emphasize that beauty distortion and self-esteem are only problems of the face and hair, and of no other part of our bodies. Despite the fact that Dove appears to be advocating for a real beauty campaign, it is an incredibly selective beauty campaign, avoiding the messy topic of body type, size or eating disorders.
Kress describes aesthetics as “… the category which seems essential to make analytic inroads here, about characteristics of the imagined … viewer/reader” (Kress 4638-47). Using Kress’s theory of “Aesthetics as the politics of style – with style as the politics of choice and ethics as the politics of (e)valuation …” (Kress 4638-47) it is possible to understand “… what kind of viewer … is imagined, with what tastes and habits, what lifestyle, what age/generation, what gender” (Kress 4647-55). Dove imagined an audience of women, most likely ranging from young girls to young women, who constantly compare and attempt to emulate the images of “perfect” women on billboards and magazines. Dove assumes that their viewers will focus on their message of searching for “real” beauty, noticing the aesthetics and promoted message of Evolution, and ignore Dove’s inability and reluctance to address issues of full body beauty, size, weight, body type or eating disorders. By concentrating on targeting young girls and young women, and using the aesthetics of their message to fight issues of self-esteem and beauty distortion, Dove hopes to create a shroud of hope in which the areas of body beauty they choose not to address can go unnoticed.
At the end of Evolution, Dove encourages the viewer to “Take part in the Dove Real Beauty Workshop for Girls” by visiting www.campaignforrealbeauty.ca, followed by their three-tiered Dove icon. By implementing their brand within their campaign for real beauty, Dove strongly associates itself with “natural” and “real” beauty, encouraging the viewer to believe that Dove is trying to support women’s search for natural beauty, so they should support Dove’s efforts too.
Kress defines “learning” as taking place within an “… institutional settin[g] [which] is a political matter and as such highly subject to power and ideology” (Kress 4780-90 – 4790-98). Therefore, according to Kress, Dove’s Evolution would fall under the category of “not learning”: “… not learning refers to the same process and phenomena as learning does, though outside of institutional framing and their metrics. Outside those framings, these are called experience, development, meaning-making, and so on” (Kress 4805-13). Dove offers a type of virtual learning experience that Kress would categorize as not learning, by offering the experience of how models actually come to look so perfect on billboards and magazines. Although there are many texts and articles reinforcing the fact that the beauty portrayed in magazines is not natural, the video medium allows for the concept of created beauty to grow through the virtual experience of witnessing the process of sculpted beauty. While Dove does offer valuable insight and a meaning-making experience to young girls and women through Evolution, they also convey the message that body image, other than that of the face, is not as important. The sculpted beauty Dove portrays in Evolution ignores not only issues of full body image, but the fact that thin models are often photoshopped to skinny perfection, making them appear “natural” and what is a very unnatural size and shape.
Despite Dove discreetly omitting concerns and truths about full body image, Dove as a brand offered hope for at least one product that would promote natural beauty, and feature natural women and realistic product/situation expectations for many female consumers. However, five years later, Dove released New Dove VisibleCare, a “… new revolutionary line of body washes that actually improves the look of your skin” while also promising “… visibly more beautiful skin in just one week” (VisibleCare). The idea of natural beauty seems to have diminished from their 2006 Evolution. Dove’s 2011 campaign promises improved forms of beauty and skin, indicating that the natural state of a woman’s skin is not the best it can be, and should be improved using Dove’s VisibleCare products.
As the advertisement begins, Dove shows the women who will be trying VisibleCare body wash to improve their skin, and achieve “more beautiful skin in just one week”. The screen shot below displays Dove’s concept of diversity, as three for the five women are Caucasian, featuring one Latina woman, and one Black woman. However, there isn’t a great deal of difference in skin tone from the Caucasian women to the Latina woman to the Black woman as all participants have very light skin. Gramsci’s idea of hegemony, “… dominant meanings and values of a society” (Rose 199-200), is reflected in Dove’s VisibleCare advertisement. In many ways, television and movie audiences have become accustomed to the token Black/Latino/Asian/non-Caucasian character, accepting this as the reality of pop culture. However, for a company that claims to value “real” beauty, despite race/colour or ethnicity, Dove seems to implying a weighty white hegemony. In a culture in which Caucasians make up the majority, minorities are often downplayed, absent, or in Dove’s case, made to appear whiter. Dove reinforces an ideology that lighter skin is the ideal form of beauty, and can be achieved using their VisibleCare products.
By creating an advertisement that essentially promises lighter skin, Dove is encoding idealized beauty as Caucasian, or as light and fair as possible. The before and after pictures of the test subjects skin reflects this code as it demonstrates a significantly lighter patch of skin after using the VisibleCare body wash for one week. Instead of demonstrating an improved smooth textured skin, Dove emphasizes the ability of their body wash to lighten skin, so that women can achieve hegemonic values of the superior lightened skin. Dove’s encoding of an idealized ‘light’ beauty fulfils Hall’s idea of ‘dominant code’ that “… supports the existing political, economic, social and cultural order” (Rose 199). Instead of creating a positive association with Dove products by exposing sculpted beauty in Evolution in 2006 as a form of counter-hegemony, Dove is perpetuating hegemonic and dominant code of ‘lightness’ and ‘whiteness’ as superior skin colours.
As Rose discusses in Chapter 10 of Visual Methodologies, anthropological approaches to visual images differ in that “What interests them most is what happens when something is done with visual materials” (Rose 217). As previously discussed, Dove made the decision to follow hegemonic and dominant codes pertaining to ‘lightness’ and ‘whiteness’, however, what will be done with Dove’s VisibleCare ad? According to comments in the Youtube comment feed, Dove received negative feedback for this advertisement, “The blog Copyranter said the ad infers that the body was “turns black women into Latino women into white women” (VisibleCare MulataLinda8). While the negative feedback Dove received for the VisibleCare ad gives hope that viewers are not accepting hegemonic and dominant codes that Dove is choosing to emulate, the fact that this ad received 1 098 views with only three comments and one dislike and one like, is discouraging. While others may be blogging about VisibleCare, Youtube is a platform known for heated discussions and opinions on their comment feeds. The lack of verbal/written communication on the VisibleCare video suggests that nothing is being “done” with the ad – at least on Youtube. In other ways, VisibleCare acts as an object of hegemonic and dominant code values, which can and is used (merely in its existence) to reinforce white laden values, and to encourage women to desire lighter, whiter skin.
Dove’s Evolution video gave hope that counter-hegemonic ideologies were being produced by mainstream companies, showing alternatives to the hegemonic dominant codes of white culture. Kress’s theories of ensembles, orchestration, aesthetics and learning allow a thorough understanding and exploration of Dove’s Evolution. The understanding and exploration of Evolution acts as a useful comparison when exploring Dove’s VisibleCare ad using Rose’s explanation of Hall’s encoding and dominant codes, Gramsci’s ideas of hegemony and counter-hegemony and the exploration of images as objects. Dove’s Evolution and VisibleCare ads allow insight into Dove’s changing attitude of counter-hegemonic ideals in 2006, to their use of hegemony and dominant codes in VisibleCare. The theories provided by Kress and Rose provides the opportunity to notice the stark contrast in Dove’s vision of beauty in 2006 to their very different and skewed vision of beauty in 2011.
Works Cited
Dove Logo. August 1, 2011. Source: http://www.dove.us/. PNG file.
“Evolution.” Youtube. Web. 30 July, 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U.
Kress, Gunther. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. Kindle edition, December 5, 2009.
Rose, Gillian. Visual Methodologies. London, Sage Publications Inc., 2007.
“VisibleCare.” Youtube. Web. 30 July, 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5youXx2eDc&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL.
VisibleCare Screen Shot Participant Group. July 31, 2011. Personal photograph by author. JPEG file.
VisibleCare Screen Shot Skin Before and After. July 31, 2011. Personal photograph by author. JPEG file.
