Honesty and beauty. Dove takes a step in the right direction.

I’m the kind of guy who prefers brutal honesty to polite lies. Like when someone says “let’s keep in touch”, I usually reply with a short speech about how it is unlikely to happen since I’m not good at keeping in touch with anybody. That’s my way of being honest. I don’t want to, even politely, leave the other with a false hope of future contact that I know I most likely won’t satisfy. Or if someone invites me for supper and after supper asks what I think of the food, I give an honest answer. If I didn’t like it, they’ll know about it. When the roles are reversed, I also expect nothing else than honesty.

I guess that attitude correlates to what I consider to be “beauty.” Models are not my cup of tea. I don’t like the fakery that is necessary in fabricating these purported icons of beauty. Maybe I’m subconsciously associating physical fakery with dishonesty at an ethical level… I don’t know.

Well, it seems that somebody at Dove gets it! They’ve just launched their Campaign for Real Beauty. This is still preprocessed beauty. I don’t think anybody can pass through the media machine without some sort of processing. Still, the girls they’ve chosen for the campaign fall outside the narrow confines of the type of “beauty” the media industry typically wants to promote. I just wish they’d raise the upper limit of the box, age-wise.