By Amari Leiva-Urzua
This week, Dove has celebrated the 20th anniversary of its Campaign for Real Beauty, which challenges society, media, and the beauty industry itself to change its representation of female beauty.
Nevertheless, in the celebration, it has found a need to redirect its campaign towards minimising the internalised misogyny in female communities face-to-face and online.
Dove’s 2024 survey, The Real State of Beauty: A global report, revealed that two in three women believe that women today are expected to be more physically attractive than their mother’s generation and 50 per cent feel pressured to alter their appearance to keep up with online trends.
With social media and AI taking beauty standards to a whole new level, why do women feel the pressure to keep up with the trends and compete with one another to see who gets there first?
As a young woman, I know that the mirror is one’s worst enemy. Every time a woman looks at it, there always seems to be something wrong. Sometimes it’s the hair. Sometimes it’s the make-up. Other times it’s the dress that shows a bit of belly fat, the skirt that fits too tight, the weather that’s ruined the hairdo or a tan gone wrong.
These are things that any woman is familiar with. However, what many of us are not familiar with is the fact that our make-up, hair, dress, jewellery, skin, and weight have become rites of beauty, a double-edged sword that we, women, use against one another.
It has long been assumed that misogyny is something that can only be inflicted on to women by men. However, the female community in this modern age has taken a toxic turn with women self-objectifying themselves and their bodies, fearing rejection and critique not solely from men but from their mothers, sisters, friends and, even worse, themselves.
Feminist author Naomi Wolf, in her non-fiction book The Beauty Myth, describes the new standards of beauty as “a new religion … a rite of passage” for social acceptance.
“When in the past women were punished for adultery, they now punish themselves for cheating on their diets … the diet books have become bibles, the rosary, the calorie counter,” she writes.
While it can be claimed that patriarchy incited the image and model for female beauty, women continue to perpetuate it to this day.
Women are currently facing the paradox where they strive to be empowered women but fall prey to labels, scrutinising overtly feminist behaviour as too sexual or a taboo and passive female behaviour as submissive, shy, or “pick me” behaviour.
If a woman comes out proudly showing off body hair, plastic surgery or minimal clothing she is labelled as inspiring and yet gross, inappropriate, and unfeminine. If she decides to come out with a hijab, she is either culturally proud or submissive. If she chooses to become a trad wife or a housewife, she immediately becomes anti-feminist and passive.
As AI becomes more usable and popular, the mirror has now become social media and the phone filter, with Dove predicting that by 2025 90 per cent of online content will be AI-generated.
Beauty brands such as Sephora and Ultra Beauty have been utilising AI images to advertise their products. Loreal’s Modiface app allows for an augmented make-up try-on and Haut Al has created SkinGPT for skin simulations.
As AI becomes increasing popular in the beauty industry, social media continues to turn beauty standards into trends, expectations.
“The trends are ever-changing and more intense and so it’s a never-ending trap and box to fit in of what ‘beauty’ is,” said singer-songwriter Jessie J, who is working in partnership with Dove.
Moving forward, Dove has publicly launched a campaign to “keep it real” on digital platforms, committing to never using AI to represent real women in its ads.
“At Dove, we seek a future in which women get to decide and declare what real beauty looks like – not algorithms. As we navigate the opportunities and challenges that come with new and emerging technology, we remain committed to protect, celebrate, and champion Real Beauty,” Dove Chief Marketing Officer Alessandro Manfredi said.
With a new campaign launched, the message remains for women to realise that the question for dismantling internalised misogyny is no longer “What will you do to dismantle the patriarchy?” but rather simply becomes “What will you see next?”.
Featured image: Fifty per cent of women feel pressured to alter their appearance because of what they see online, even when they know it’s fake or AI generated. Photo: Rakicevic Nenad/CC/Negative Space, edited by Amari Leiva-Urzua
