5455: Does She Or Doesn’t She? Who Cares?

Now Dove is responding tough to the accusations that ad photographs were retouched in the allegedly pure Real Beauty campaign. A Unilever executive declared, “The ‘real women’ ad referenced in recent media coverage was created and produced entirely by Ogilvy, the Dove brand’s advertising agency, from start to finish, and the women’s bodies were not digitally altered.”

Whatever.

First of all, Ogilvy is hardly a bastion of honesty. Regardless, the issue seems overblown—and dumb too. As MultiCultClassics continues to point out, the campaign has hardly been real in its depictions. The ad in question might not have been retouched. But anyone who has ever worked on beauty accounts knows photography, styling, makeup and lighting are just as capable of bending reality as Photoshop manipulation. Take a close look at the two Dove ads presented above and try to deny there was serious retouching involved.

In the end, Dove inspired the backlash via sanctimonious messaging that attacked its own category in the “Evolution” commercial. Hey, people who live in glass houses shouldn’t prance around in their retouched-free underwear. It just makes things ugly.