“Do you think you’re beautiful?” I ask my girlfriend, as we’re about to eat dinner. “Or do you think you’re just, like, kinda average really?” There ensues a silence that is above-average in awkwardness as she glares at me. I decide it’s probably wise to clarify the question. “Look,” I say, pushing two plates towards her. “Beauty is a choice – and the power of this choice is in your hands. Pick plate one if you think you’re beautiful. Pick plate two if you think you’re average. Hashtag ChooseBeautiful.” Long story short, she yelled at me until the food got cold.
The moral of this story is that you shouldn’t try to conduct dubious self-esteem experiments at home; you should leave them to multinational corporations. More specifically, you should leave them to Dove, which has mastered the art of passing off somewhat passive-aggressive and patronising advertising as super-empowering, ultra PR-able social commentary. The personal care brand has just released a film called Choose Beautiful, in which it sets out to “prove that beauty is a choice – and the power of this choice is in your hands”. Yeah, sorry, I didn’t make that sentence up. Dove, to its credit, set about proving its hypothesis via a more sophisticated mechanism than dinner plates; it used doors. The brand put signs saying “beautiful” and “average” above adjacent entrances to public buildings in five different cities. Then they turned on their cameras and recorded what happened next.
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