Ad About Women's Self-Image Creates a Sensation - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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An online video, presented in three- and six-minute versions, shows a forensic sketch artist who is asked to draw a series of women based only on their descriptions. Seated at a drafting table with his back to his subject, the artist, Gil Zamora, asks the women a series of questions about their features. “Tell me about your chin,” he says in the soft voice reminiscent of a therapist’s. Crow’s feet, big jaws, protruding chins and dark circles are just some of the many physical features that women criticized about themselves. After he finishes a drawing of a woman, he then draws another sketch of the same woman, only this time it is based on how someone else describes her. The sketches are then hung side by side and the women are asked to compare them. In every instance, the second sketch is more flattering than the first.
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The video, shot in a loft in San Francisco, has become a sensation online. The three-minute version has been viewed more than 7.5 million times on the Dove YouTube channel, and the version that is twice as long has been viewed more than 936,000 times.
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Dove executives said the campaign resulted from company research that showed only 4 percent of women consider themselves beautiful.
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“As women we are so hard on ourselves physically and emotionally,” Ms. Olive said. “It gets you to stop and think about how we think of ourselves.”
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Ms. Brice took issue with the tag line for the ad, “You’re More Beautiful Than You Think.” “I Think it makes people much more susceptible to absorbing the subconscious messages,” Ms. Brice said, “that at the heart of it all is that beauty is still what defines women. It is a little hypocritical.”
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“What if I did look like that woman on the left?” she said, referring to the less flattering sketches of the women. “There are people that look like that.”