Dove addresses toxic social media influence on beauty in new campaign

Toxic advice on social media is polluting the perception of beauty among young girls and Dove continues to address subjects surrounding beauty and self-esteem with the new campaign, highlighting the vice of technology takeover.

Dove has been a pioneer in setting realistic beauty standards free of typecasts, with their marketing campaigns. Inferiority complexes, beauty stereotypes, societal criticism, the contaminated definition of ideal beauty, and several concerns and subjects have been addressed in various initiatives by Dove, and Toxic Influence, their recent campaign gets a grip on the present-day element distorting the definition of beauty.

Directed by Henry Alex-Reuben, and created in association with Ogilvy, the campaign commences in a social experiment format, asking mother-daughter duos about how they feel about beauty advice on social media. The campaign then progresses to the mothers' deepfakes voicing these statements. The video portrays the mothers giving toxic beauty advice by generating their deepfakes using face-mapping technology.

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Social media has been known to lead to an atmosphere that triggers behavioural patterns such as seeking validation and succumbing to the filtered and fake degree of beauty. This has also led to depression and anxiety, especially in young girls, and eventually contributed to the spike in the suicidal rate.

The current culture around beauty and how women are affected negatively by it is weaved in an impactful concept that replaces the voice of social media influencers with mothers of teenage girls, to illustrate the impact of statements surfacing on social networks that project toxic influence.

The campaign is a part of the Dove Self-Esteem Project initiative supporting the #DetoxYourFeed movement that aims to enable young people to turn their feeds into a positive space and protect themselves from toxic beauty advice on social media.