Whats with all the critisism?

However, even though Dove have seem to spend a lot of money, time and effort to launch the campaign for real beauty there are many people who feel that the campaign is all a sham. The campaign as received some huge criticisms about its real intentions for launching the campaign as Unilever (the owner of Dove) also produce a product called ‘Fair and Lovely’, a skin-lightening cream aimed at dark-skinned women from different countries so they can make their skin ‘Fair’ and in effect more beautiful, yet Dove try to teach us that physical variation is what’s beautiful.

It was also widely distinguished that Unilever also own the brand Lynx who’s advertising campaigns would seemingly contradict the sentiment of the Campaign For Real Beauty. Furthermore, Unilever owns and markets their AXE brand of hygiene products, where their campaigning staple is to overtly sexualize women. The main advert where they overtly sexualize women is in the ‘Lynx effect’ advert when an average male sprays lynx over himself to find women come running along the beach towards him in their bikini’s (highly out of his league) and start undo-ing their bikini tops. This strategy is blatantly hypocritical in contrast to Dove's campaign for "Real Beauty", as AXE exploits "idealized" female sexuality to market AXE products towards young men. Although I feel there is no justification for the ‘Fair and Lovely’ branding of products, Unilever could validate that the reasons they use a complete deviation in terms of marketing the Lynx/AXE products is that the targeted audience are a completely different crowd as Dove is targeted at women and Lynx is targeted at men. At the end of the day they have to sell a product and Unilever have noted that using this exaggerated marketing deploy of over sexualizing women has made their Lynx products highly successful when targeting males. Although this is a valid reason however this still would not solve the problems of women with a lack of self-esteem and anxiety over their flaws.A small minority of women will have the confidence to feel independent and that they only have to be beautiful for themselves, however  the fact is that the majority of the women will want to feel attractive to the opposite sex. This is because it is built into our brains to gain this attraction from the opposite sex from the very beginning. Unilever may launch thousands of campaigns and funds to boost the confidence of the women. If advertising marketed at young men are still showing this perception of ‘idealized’ females they will begin to think that the manipulation of advertisement and this perception of idealized females is possible and achievable, then young men will never understand the concept that Dove is trying to get across and will never appreciate ‘real beauty’.

 

(on the page there will be an image of the ‘Fair and Lovely’ product, a couple of examples of the lynx adverts including a comparison between lynx and Dove)