Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ Campaign Takes On Photoshoppers In Viral Video

For a decade now, Dove has been promoting its “Real Beauty” campaign, which is aimed at changing perceptions of beauty as promoted through the media and showing that beautiful women come in all shapes and sizes. Of course, while it is an elaborate campaign to get more people to buy their soaps, it is also innovative in that it uses real women instead of models.

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.