Now the “Real Beauty” campaign is targeting the people who are literally distorting perceptions of beauty — the graphic designers. In this YouTube video, the brand, owned by Unilever, touted its “Beautify” Photoshop action using Reddit and other sites frequented by graphic designers, saying it would help add a skin glow. Photo editors and art designers who downloaded the action thought they were adding a skin glow effect to the photo of a woman given to them by Dove, but were instead in for a surprise. When they used the effect, it actually un-photoshopped the photos and then gave this message: “Don’t manipulate our perceptions of real beauty.”
The company wouldn’t say how many people downloaded the action, but from the Reddit thread, it looks like they didn’t get many responses. Still, Dove’s anti-Photoshop YouTube video went viral, having amassed more than 230,000 views at the time of this writing.
[…] used real women as part of their billboard campaigns and more recently tricked graphic designers into downloading a Photoshop action that supposedly added a skin glow to the sample image, but […]