Caveat emptor

Dove wants us to think we’re beautiful, but only if it sells more Dove products.

One of the company’s most popular ads shows the dissonance between how beautiful women are versus how ugly they perceive themselves.

The video is part of a larger Dove campaign that encourages you to “love the skin you’re in,” a series that has been lauded for using models of all shapes and sizes to promote positive body image.

And it’s all a crock of shit.

Though it’s cool that Dove commercials depict a range of body types as beautiful and loveable, the ads are nothing but deceptive marketing.

Dove, like many companies that try to profit off a moral stance, is practicing sleight of hand. Look at the body-positive advertisements in this hand as the other picks your wallet clean.

Assigning moral values to any company is ridiculous because its primary value is always money. Otherwise it’d be a nonprofit organization.

It’s impossible to peddle beauty products to women without capitalizing off insecurities.

Dove has a print ad featuring a cheerful older woman who asks, “Wrinkled?” or
“Wonderful?”

Meanwhile, its pro-age lotion attempts to keep skin looking younger.

When women don’t have enough insecurities, these companies invent some.

Take Dove’s Clear Tone Sheer deodorant, which promises to reduce dark marks and uneven skin tone in your armpits.

After I saw an ad for the product, I peered warily under my arms. I had no idea that my underarm skin was so hideous.

Globally, companies have a history of inventing problems for consumers to have.

The only reason shaving armpits has become the norm for so many women today is due, in part, to the need for Gillette to expand razor sales in 1915.

Its new razor for women coincided with changes in fashion that allowed women to sport bare arms and an ad in Harper’s Bazaar that encouraged ladies to remove “objectionable hair.”

By making you feel insecure and then providing a remedy for that insecurity, these products make you about as happy as you would have been had you never heard of
them, but poorer.

In other words, these products make you worse off — a kind of big glitch in that is supposed to maximize consumer “jollies.”

Perhaps consumers silly enough to be taken in by the beauty and pharmaceutical industries should be blamed for their own misfortune, but at a certain point, enough people fall for the marketing to make shaving your armpits and using wrinkle cream a societal standard.

For companies like Dove, caveat emptor applies.

Buyer, beware Dove’s feel-good marketing. It’s all an act.

— casefarr@indiana.edu
Follow columnist Casey Farrington on Twitter @casefarr.