Beauty Is Skin Deep

Dove has a new marketing campaign to try to get you to buy their products bring awareness about the beauty industry. It's a short film called "Onslaught" and it's about body image and self esteem for girls. I guess I shouldn't knock it because they don't have to do it at all and it does make you think.

But, it's making me think about things that I'm sure they didn't intend.




First, 95% of the images in it are of white women. So essentially, self-esteem is not for me. Yes, I think this movie is telling me that the self-esteem of black, Latino and Asian women pales in importance next to the self-esteem of our Caucasian sisters. Because you know, culturally, we are okay being a bigger size and we don't get eating disorders. Our little girls might pick the blond haired, blue-eyed baby doll as the most beautiful, but really, it's the little red-headed white girl with the cute freckles that we have to be worried about. That little red-headed girl 's gonna die under the onslaught of images that tell her that she's not dark enough, her hair isn't nappy enough, and her booty isn't round enough. Poor thang!

Gosh, it's gotta be hard for the little red-head girl to see women who look like her on the covers of every major fashion magazine every single month, especially when they're all telling her she's not good enough. And, oh no! She might find out that Lindsay Lohan has red hair and freckles in real life and have a panic attack over it. Horrors!

I guess black, Latino and Asian women shouldn't care about whether most of the media images of us are primarily of lighter skinned women. Last time I checked, I haven't seen any ads featuring really short, dark descendants of Aztecs...or of those really dark Cantonese folks...or those really dark sista's from the deep South. Hmm...I wonder why that could be.

Maybe it's because Unilever, the parent company of Dove, is too busy promoting SKIN LIGHTENERS around the world to women who aren't white. At the end of the Dove film, there's a slow-mo shot of a bunch of girls, and that's where they throw the diversity in, along with the tag line, "Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does." Just make sure to skip the talk about how skin lighteners are racist, right?

Feel like throwing up this morning? Well watch this:


Yes, make sure to tell your daughters that if they're lighter-skinned, their career is going to be made! And they're gonna get the hot guy too!

Yes, lighter skin. That's all we need for higher self-esteem.