Second Draft of Blog Entry "Dove Evolution Commercial"

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 setting and format of the Dove Evolution commercial is strategically planned. 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, or 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 now believes that the “perfect” person is the person the media portrays. Magazines create lists of the “hottest” women in the country, most of which are all under the healthy weight for their height. Television shows are filled with women that are extremely skinny. There is no way to avoid this constant pressure to look a certain. The dove evolution commercial’s purpose is to bring light to fact that Photoshop and make-up change the completely appearance of people and that no one will ever be able to look that way, but this is only one small attempt and to truly change the advertisement business it is going to take much more than this one commercial.