Unnatural Beauty

Kal Cobalt
RS Dove evolution.jpg

The Dove short film "Evolution" is a time-lapsed look at what it takes for a model to become billboard material. Lighting, makeup, and a startling amount of digital image manipulation create a face that does not actually exist in the interest of promoting beauty products.

The short film has won the prestigious Grand Prix for viral marketing at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, and the YouTube video has been viewed over four million times. While some question the sincerity of the film and wonder whether it represents a company seeking extra ad revenue rather than a sea change in the beauty industry, the stark truths this film exposes are powerful regardless of motive.

 

Thanks to Sorcha, my co-writer at The Food Noobs blog, for bringing this video to my attention.

Comments

This should be shown

Submitted by JGex on Wed, 10/10/2007 - 11:12.
to every grade school aged child in the civilized world. It would help put things in perspective....

no kidding

Submitted by Kal Cobalt on Wed, 10/10/2007 - 12:00.
And all the adults, too. Some of the comments on this film on YouTube are even more disturbing than the film itself, in that some still aspire to achieve that level of (wholly artificial) "beauty."

How very depressing..

Submitted by JGex on Thu, 10/11/2007 - 21:44.

that there is still a societal level of shallowness that creates an atmospere where anyone feels the need to aspire to levels so far beyond just enhancing their natural attributes.

And if there are some who still aspire for that, how many others throw their hands up in despair? How many cases of eating disorders result from this pursuit of "beauty?"

Then there is this: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/OnCall/story?id=3481336&page=1

Sad....

 

I'm definitely showing this

Submitted by hilary.jaye on Thu, 10/11/2007 - 13:13.

to the girl child. She has a pretty strong sense of self, but I think this is one of those videos I'm going to try to save for later when she starts wondering about her own self-image.

 

What's even more disturbing to me is that we somehow came to decide that woman wasn't pretty enough as she was. I think I want to make a screencap of just the bit where they're resizing her eyes. That was truly creepy.

 

--Reality Sandwich took up all my awake.

I had the same reaction

Submitted by Kal Cobalt on Thu, 10/11/2007 - 15:57.

I had the same reaction to the eye resizing. It feels so much more invasive, somehow.

 

I think the brilliance of this film is its visual nature. We all know these things go on, but most of us are so visually oriented that it's difficult to combat messages we take in by sight with knowledge we've acquired from text.

 

A few weeks ago, I looked up at a billboard which depicted two people interacting, and I realized I had no idea whether they were actual people or CG images. At professional billboard resolution, I don't know that anyone without major visual-effects knowledge could ever tell the difference. Between that experience and this video, billboards have become distinctly surreal to me.

Jenna

Submitted by Madona Wilson on Thu, 07/22/2010 - 07:17.
Jenna