ABOUT

Since 2004, Dove has been fighting unrealistic beauty standards. Sadly, those same unrealistic beauty standards still exist today and it’s far worse: instead of the media distorting their images, the young girls are doing to themselves. This level of distortion is causing selfie dysmorphia, a rise in cosmetic surgery and has even been cited as the lead cause for an increase in teen suicides. Through the experiences of real girls, we created a campaign that shined a light on the pressures of social media and the dangers of retouching apps to children around the world. “Reverse Selfie” follows the true story of Grace and the editing apps she uses to achieve the ‘ideal’ selfie. The same harmful and readily available editing apps that are in the hands of billions of girls. Every filter and retouched blemish were authentically recreated based on the tools Grace and the girls from our cast use to edit their selfies every day. Through film, print, social and body-positive campaigner, Lizzo, our campaign called on parents and guardians to have the ‘selfie talk’ and educate a girl they know in the dangers of social media and editing apps. Integration was integral to our campaign as we needed to speak to a wide range of people, firstly across America and then around the world. We ensured our campaign had multiple angles in order to deliver our message: TV, OOH and Print allowed us to tell more of the narrative, whereas PR, digital and social allowed us to expose the dangers of social media on the platforms themselves. Integration was also key to the 6 billion global impressions and downloads of the ‘selfie talk’ confidence kit, 66.3M teenagers reached on TikTok, and +2,650% increase of toolkit downloads in the first week, becoming an educational tool in schools.