Beauty brand Dove has gone viral for its latest body positivity ad, which explores social media’s negative impact on a child’s body image and self-esteem.
The three-minute PSA for the Dove Self-Esteem Project in the UK emphasizes how toxic beauty standards can lead to life-threatening eating disorders in young girls.
The ad centres around Mary, following her from childhood to early adolescence. At the beginning of the piece, as a child, she is completely free, happy, and not self-conscious at all – innocently posing for pictures.
This changes when she gets a smartphone for one of her birthdays.
From that moment Mary becomes sucked into the world of online beauty and unrealistic body standards. She can be seen writing “keep out” in her diary and outlining her weight loss goals.
We then see her endlessly scrutinizing her body, planning a weight loss and workout routine and weighing herself.
Her clearly concerned mum tries to take the phone away from her.
Things escalate with Mary writing cruel things about herself in her diary.
“Look at yourself. Your gross ugly self,” Mary writes. She continues to scroll endlessly through social content – in one clip we can see a thin influencer saying the thigh gap is back in fashion.
We then see Mary, pale and thin – entering an eating disorder clinic.
We move forward and see an older, healthier Mary. Her mum sings the lines to her “You are so beautiful to me”. Mary wipes a tear from her mother’s face.
Finally, Dove shows us a montage of young women of all different shapes, skin tones and sizes – all in recovery from body dysmorphia and eating disorders.
The advert ends with the feeling of hope – recovery is possible.
Dove has been very vocal in its support of body positivity, earlier this year it slammed the Oscars for awarding film, The Whale for best makeup and hairstyling. In the film, actor Brendan Fraser wore a fat suit.
Dove said: “Stop giving fat suits awards. We want better representation in Hollywood.”
