In The Beauty Prescription, we talk about the Dove ad campaign called Real Beauty that ran in 2007, showing how beautiful real women with curves and gray hair and non-model figures can be when they’re not made to be embarrassed about themselves.  We loved this campaign and know lots of women who did, but it turns out that wasn’t the end of the story.  Dove and its parent company, Unilever, have also been building something called the Dove Self-Esteem Fund, which intends to reach out to 5 million young women around the world by 2010.  The goal is one we couldn’t support more enthusiastically: to help free young women from self-limiting beauty stereotypes that lead to low self-esteem, body dysmorphia, eating disorders and a generally negative self-image.  So far, the program has reached more than 2 million young women around the globe and continues to raise money for its efforts.

This is exactly the kind of thing we support in our book, our medical careers and our private lives.  We both have daughters, and we shudder to think of them growing up burdened by the same expectations of a perfect face and body that we’ve seen scar many of our patients.  To combat this, Dove is doing things like creating online-only short films (one of which won two awards at Cannes) and partnering with organizations like the Girl Scouts to produce nearly 2,700 self-esteem building and educational events in the U.S., U.K. and around the world. Concerned moms can go to the Fund’s website and find all sorts of tools they can use with their own girls.

This is a cause not just worth supporting but worth emulating.  It’s wonderful to see a corporation focus on using its influence to improve the lives of the people who it hopes will buy their products.  Sure, they are doing it with a profit motive and trying to win hearts and minds, but there’s nothing wrong with that.  Dove could have just done a public service announcement and called it a day, but they didn’t.  They’re using their resources to make a positive difference, and for that they deserve to be lauded and supported.

Tags: corporations, education, self-esteem, young women

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 28th, 2008 at 10:09 am and is filed under Psychology, Society and Culture, inner beauty. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.