The models in Dove's "Real Beauty" campaign (whose tagline was "we believe real beauty comes in many shapes, sizes and ages") may have benefitted from some "digital plastic surgery."
From The Telegraph:
Pascal Dangin, a celebrated retoucher of fashion pictures, claimed the Dove women were far from au naturel. In an interview with New Yorker magazine, Mr Dangin, who runs Box Studios in New York, a company which retouches photographs and does regular work for Vogue, and the fashion companies Dior and Balenciaga, said that he had manipulated the photographs heavily. When asked about the four-year-old campaign, he said: "Do you know how much retouching was on that? But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive."
Dove's ad agency is denying it, insisting that they have no record of Dangin working on that campaign.
Comments
There'a a diet book that used to be hugely popular in the UK - Rosemary Conley's Hip and Thigh diet, with a picture of her looking very slim on the cover. I was dating a photographer at the time, and he showed me exactly how the photo had been retouched to make her look slimmer than she actually was - and looking at other diet books and videos, I could see the same thing. So even those people who claim to have lost pounds on diets have had to be retouched!
On another note - Sakano...get over yourself. People are naturally many shapes. Even people who eat nutritious meals can have big thighs or a round rear.
My point is that it's great to be proud of how you look. But when being proud of how you look includes putting down other people (whether it's a skinny woman calling a fat woman a cow, or a fat woman calling a skinny woman anorexic or "fake") then that's not a good thing.
Dove isn't trying to say "you're not a real woman if you're skinny",
but rather "You don't need to look like a skinny photoshopped super-model in order to be pretty"
Once they appear in an ad campaign in their underwear, whether male or female, they are considered models... All Dove has done was enforce the ol' saying, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", 'cept NOW these "ordinary women" have been destroyed by a FAT HEAD as well!!!
My point was/is, once these wome were dubbed as "models", they're no lomger "real". They instantly fall into the same category as the rest of the plastic media. They're NO different than any of the rest of the phony BIMBO'S in the business, 'cept for their average looks !!!
Wow, aren't cameras magic, sucking a woman's brain out like that!
Right.
No it isn't. The point of Dove commercials is to sell Dove products. Let's not get carried aweay eh?
But they're still trying to send out that message, even if it isn't their main goal 😛
Dangin has a shop called Box Studios where 80 people work full-time digitally prettying up photos. Lots of professional photographers have him on retainer.
The article also implies that practically every picture in in many popular magazines (e.g. Vogue, Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan) has been digiatlly buffed.
Posted by Nona on Wed May 14, 2008 at 03:14 AM
Those were your words, NOT MINE (but I like what you had to say in THIS statement). However, it's not the camera that "sucks the brains out of a woman", it's the ARROGANCE of these women once they BECOME a model!!! I've had a hard time putting my finger on the 'magic' of this transformation, but I think you did a mighty fine job of describing it yourself, THANX...
Oh, and the EXTENSIVE use of EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!!
Though I do find it a bit iffy to assume that he knows the models from the Dove ads to say that they're arrogant as soon as they've gone into a photo shoot. Unless he knows them personally, it's presumptuous, hypocritical, and somehow ironic for him to go off and start making proclamations about their characters.
I will say this about the ads -- I'm not the least bit surprised. Dove was in all likelihood attempting to recapture attention and part of the market that was already confident enough to stop caring about being a bit rounder than the average supermodel, though without the dimples and pudge. As snowowl pointed out, they aren't proclaiming that skinny people aren't beautiful, but rather than if you're not skinny, don't sweat about it so much and buy some lotion and soap.
The fact that the photos were retouched is to be expected. Virtually every photo is retouched in an ad campaign whether it's of a piece of fruit, a car or of people.
They were then put into a shortlist pile based on whether or not they matched the prodcos and directors and branding requirements, which would include a specified distribution of ethnicities and sizes and looks.
This is all so heavilly vetted and screened and selected even before it ever reaches the Photoshop stage anyway.
There is about as much 'reality' in this ad as there is in a Big Brother conversation between a bunch of ex-actors with careers on the wane.
I dont think that Dove or any company care about how you feel... they care about how much they will sell... So, no one can convince me that Dove was trying to be kind, or trying to take away the mystic concept that only famous models are beautiful. Dove in the past and in the future will be making use of them also... it was just a period in their add's.
Another last thing to say is that: You should be happy about how you look, no matter what... if its not being bad for your health, just be happy... its not about beauty, its about health... dont care about fashion magazines, models, etc... its all photoshop anyway... this companies cannot live without this kind of softwares anymore, because in their minds: There is no woman beautiful enough to be a model without retouch... =)