Dove's Latest Real Beauty Ad May Have Jumped the Shark

Dove's "Real Beauty" campaign, where regular women of all shapes and sizes appeared in ads instead of supermodels, was a huge hit. It changed the way that Americans talked about beauty products and advertisements. But it also benefited Dove in a major way, taking them from  "a company who sells that nice soap" to "a company who sells that nice soap and also makes women feel good about their bodies."

Since then, empowerment has been as much a part of Dove's brand as soap and skincare products. They followed up the Real Beauty campaign with one where women described themselves and then each other to police sketch artists in order to visualize the difference between the way they saw their looks and the way other people perceived them. That ad was viewed over 60 million times on Youtube.

And now, here's Dove's latest initiative: a product called the "beauty patch," which women apply on their arm at night a la the nicotine patch. When they wake up, they feel more confident and have better self-esteem. It could be an innovation that revolutionizes the beauty industry and changes the way that women live forever.

Spoiler alert: it won't. Because the product is a placebo. The "beauty patch" is fake. It turns out that everything women need to feel beautiful already exists inside of them.

That's a beautiful idea. But let's not give Dove a Nobel Peace Prize just yet.  If this video were made by a nonprofit organization, it would be an inspiring story. But it's an ad made by a company whose main goal is to sell beauty products. Just because they've changed the ad game by selling products through messages of empowerment, they still want you to buy their soap. Ads like these foster brand loyalty, and much like the "beauty patch" itself, shrink a bigger issue into a small, tricky little package.

And it's not just Dove using feminist ideas for profit. Other brands have jumped on the empowerment-in-ad-campaigns bandwagon. In 2013, haircare company Pantene made a commercial about how different adjectives are applied to men and women in the workplace (like "boss" for man vs "bossy" for woman).

"It’s marketing masquerading as feminism, and I’m kinda getting sick of it," Jessica Roy wrote on Time.com when the Pantene ad first aired in the US. "It’s still important to recognize these videos for what they truly are: a clever way for the same old companies to make money off of women."

Still, it looks like the empowerment-through-products trend isn't going anywhere. In February, broadcaster Soledad O'Brien partnered with cosmetics megabrand Cover Girl on a campaign called "Girls Can." She is creating and curating content about young women and education for the cosmetics megabrand, whose faces include Janelle Monae and Pink — both beautiful women, but ones considered "edgy" and "different" by Hollywood standards.

"Girls Can" highlights what young women are capable of accomplishing — and, hopefully, one of those accomplishments can be feeling great without needing the help of a corporate beauty brand.