The Perfect Girl

Stick-skinny models with long, perfectly curled hair and flawless skin bombard advertisements all around us. While growing up every girl is told that it is unhealthy and harmful to be that skinny many people still have the desire to be exactly like the “perfectly” built swim suit models they see in the media. What none of the advertisements explain is that most of the images are photo-shopped and edited and it is not physically possible to look like the ads. Dove, the company, came out with a commercial called Dove Evolution to show what really happens behind the scenes of the making of an advertisement. While this commercial is only a little over a minute long the message it portrays is one that should be passed along to every generation until advertisements of fake women cease.

Pounds of make-up and hairspray, and countless hair styling tools are only the beginning of the process the model in the dove evolution commercial endures. The clip shows the hair and make-up process sped up by the end of the thirty seconds the model is almost unrecognizable. Then hundreds of pictures are taken and from the hundred, one is considered a good starting point. The last thirty seconds shows the scary part of the advertising industry, the part that is hidden as best as possible from the public. This would be the use of Photoshop. The commercial shows someone’s computer screen manipulating every part of the models face: her eyes and lips are made bigger, her neck is stretched out, and her face shape is shrunk just to name a few things. Then, finally, they produce the picture to put on advertisements.

The picture of Faith Hill, a well-known country singer, is another example of how much editing is done to pictures before a magazine prints them. Faith Hill looks beautiful in the first image, but apparently her skin is smooth enough, her arms are not skinny enough, and her is not the perfect shade of blonde for the magazine. Why advertisers feel the need to do this is discussed in Feminism and Pop Culture. Andi Zeisler says the “chief aim” of advertising is make women “feel insecure and off balance for most of their waking moments: too short, too tall, too fat, too skinny, dull-haired, lumpy-bottomed, flat-chested, thin-lipped, too pale, not pale enough, too smart, too dumb, not sexy, a lax housekeeper, a lazy cook, a bad mother, a neglectful spouse”(Zeisler 24). By portraying women that appear perfect the companies’ hope is women will desire to be like them and buy their product. Zeisler’s quote hits on seventeen traits that advertisements try to make people feel they lack in, but the possibilities of traits that they could choose to attack are endless. This is what leads to people believing that there is only one way a person should look or act based on what they see in the media. Dove is one company that is striving to end these beliefs.

The set of the Dove Evolution commercial is strategically planned to enhance their message. The choice of showing just the models face makes the audience focus on her and nothing else. Not even the make-up artists or hair stylist’s faces are shown during the commercial. In addition, the background of the commercial is a neutral gray.

The creators of the advertisements wanted to insure that there would be no other distractions. Making the background and setting as neutral as possible is the best way to guarantee their message is understood.

Girls and boys grow up constantly seeing pictures in magazines, on television, on billboards, and on posters that illustrate women and men that are not even real people. The amount of editing and retouching done on a picture before it is considered good enough is incredible. It makes sense that everyone wants to look the way that media portrays people because everyone believes that the “perfect” person is the person the media portrays, the danger is not many people realize that photoshopping and editing is done. There is no way to avoid this constant pressure to look a certain way. Dove’s evolution commercial’s purpose is to bring light to fact that retouching and make-up completely change appearance of people and that no one will ever be able to look the way magazine’s depict people, but this is only one small attempt and to truly change the advertisement business and it is going to take much more than this one commercial to start making changes.