The Beauty Plague
Can a consumer brand unbrainwash the world?
When does commercial advertising qualify as activism, or public service?
The answer is: seldom.
Over the years, there have been many an attempt to thread that needle, and usually the results are — what’s the word? — repulsive. Benetton springs to mind. For 20 years, it used its print ads, ostensibly, to shine healing light on various scourges, from HIV/AIDS to racism. The company was widely praised for eschewing the tired tropes of fashion advertising to focus on real-world problems. Shallow observers actually uttered “courageous” and “provocative.” Nope. It was merely cynical — issuing a stream of banal pieties about conditions requiring no illumination, because they are gaping wounds to a society unseen by nobody. In other words: a self-righteous but exploitative gambit to sell colorful mix-and-match separates.
Back in 1999, Philip-Morris donated about $125,000 worth of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese to relief efforts for the Kosovar refugees fleeing Serbian attack — because we all must help innocent victims, mustn’t we? We must put aside our own interests to come to the aid of our fellow man. Yeah. Then the company spent several million dollars making a TV commercial (filmed in the Czech Republic with 300-some fake-refugee extras) to brag about its selfless philanthropy.
Who would do such a thing? Ah! That question has an answer, too: a company that spent an entire century murdering hundreds of millions of smokers, and still does. That’s who.The episode was as depraved as advertising can get.
Or maybe not.
In Pakistan, early in the millennium, the Procter & Gamble Co. ran a sales promotion in which they donated a small percentage of every sale of Pampers disposable diapers in the country toward purchasing hospital beds in impoverished communities. The business goal, as in all such promotions, was to increase sales and market share. P&G didn’t mention that motive, though, in its self-congratulatory Save the Children-style ad, featuring undernourished, sick children with flies buzzing in their eyes. I know someone who was on location for that shoot; the director, I’m told, demanded more flies.
I happen to be familiar with these outrages because, from 1985 to 2010, I was the advertising critic for Advertising Age, the trade newspaper. Pretty good gig. Certainly there was no shortage of raw material. Among the more memorable undertakings I evaluated was the 2004 Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, which also famously did some eschewing. Instead of casting size-zero runway models and other improbably gorgeous women, they opted for lovely models with ordinary physiques. None of them was prototypically unattractive, but it was a call to reject unrealistic standards and to embrace self-esteem.
Dove took some criticism on hypocrisy grounds, because its parent company, Unilever, has plenty to answer for on the charge of selling unrealistic. Notably Axe body spray, which tells adolescent boys and young men that they can go from loser to player in an instant.
Nonetheless, both as a marketing strategy and as a principle, Dove’s choice to ask women to celebrate themselves — not to try to fix supposed flaws — was as welcome as it was shrewd. Subsequent ads in the campaign outed the Photoshop tricks that digitally manipulate photographic images to cover girl standards. In other words, a cruel and ubiquitous fraud.
Alas, across the culture, fraud won. In the so-called Media Age, the idealization of unachievable beauty standards flourished like kudzu. Fashion magazines, TV ads and Hollywood sold an overwhelmingly unattainable standard of beauty that had a toxic — and academically documented — negative effect on women and girls. Depression. Self-loathing. Eating disorders. Self harm. They all flourished, too, along with plastic surgery, worthless “age-defying” nostrums and the predatory weight-loss industry. It was mass brainwashing, whose perpetrators were punished with fabulous wealth.
Then came social media — especially Instagram — and things got worse by at least one order of magnitude. Self-loathing, and the clinical catastrophe that goes with it, went tragically viral.
Meta studies, consolidating the findings of dozens of individual research papers, have correlated social media with a worldwide pandemic of psychiatric disorders, including a sharp spike in teen suicide. One such, from 2022, was The Use of Social Media in Children and Adolescents: Scoping Review on the Potential Risks. Another (2020) was State Suicide Rates Among Adolescents and Young Adults Aged 10–24: United States, 2000–2018. Yet another (2021) was The relationship between Instagram use and indicators of mental health: A systematic review. Together, the scholarship amounts to a long, alarming bill of indictment.
The question is: Are there solutions to the siege on the adolescent psyche, or is this akin to climate change — damage so vast and severe that it may be too late.
But here comes Dove, again, trying to do brand advertising and social activism at the same time with a campaign called “The Cost of Beauty.” Its new video — titled “Mary’s Story” — puts a human face on the grotesque mass brainwashing perpetrated on our children.
It’s constructed from bits of home videos gathered over Mary’s life, beginning in her cheerful, outgoing, almost magical childhood. To a lilting cover of “You Are So Beautiful,” the first 40 seconds is a montage of a happy beautiful child in a loving family. Then, at the age of 12, she opens her present from the folks, and it is a smart phone. The next 35 seconds could be called “The Descent.” We see her not with family but with her phone. We see her content, all from skinny fashion influencers. We see her selfies, suddenly displaying sexualized poses. We hear her online icons encouraging a thin summertime waist. We see her adorable smile gradually disappear as her weight-loss obsession grows. And a journal entry: “Today I overate at lunch.” And another: “look at yourself your gross, ugly self.” At 1:49, she is checked in at a hospital eating-disorders ward. In tears.
The onscreen title card reads, “The cost of toxic beauty content is greater than we think.”
I will not reveal the ending to Mary’s story. You can decide for yourself whether the melodrama is too manipulative or overwrought. What follows is another montage, of other girls and young women — all in recovery — posing sweetly with their devoted moms. Then another onscreen message:
Social media is harming the mental health of 3 in 5 kids. Join us in legislation to make it safer. Sign the petition to pass the Online Safety Act at Dove.com.
That assertion involves some assumption. Yes, the data on child and adolescent psychiatric issues is alarming, and the numbers have exploded in the social-media era. Cause and effect are presumed, not proven — because adolescence is itself a diagnosis, and the history of body dysphoria is very long. Furthermore, there is some phoniness afoot. Some of the shots are clearly not gathered from a family archive, but shot by the producers to propel the narrative. If Mary videoed her bathroom scale readings and diary passages, I’ll donate a kidney to Vladimir Putin.
But those are quibbles. Correlation isn’t necessarily causation, true — but if Instagram, YouTube and TikTok haven’t poured gasoline onto the flames of adolescent self loathing, I’d give Putin my other kidney, too. Like all other parents of girls, I have seen this play out in devastating fashion.
As to the goal — passing federal legislation — that’s not so straightforward either. As a matter of the 1st Amendment, it is impossible to regulate online content that isn’t demonstrably criminal in nature. And on the user side, there is no tool for limiting minors’ accessibility to content that the kids won’t immediately learn to render futile. The irony of anorexia-triggering material is that, among the target audience, there is an insatiable appetite for it.
Moreover, tech legislation is notoriously terrible at dealing with the future, even the very near future. Reasonable laws have been passed — notably Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — that are almost quaintly incapable of addressing unintended consequences lurking just over the horizon.
Still, still, still … something must be done to protect our children, even if it is to form a “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk” consensus that in time shames Thinfluencers off the internet.
Surely, we as a society cannot just surrender to such widespread harm on the grounds of complexity. And surely we must applaud even the most self-interested commercial brand if it can illuminate the scale of the crisis and motivate a complacent public to act. We have idiot parents storming school board meetings to ban literature on library shelves for fear of non-existent “grooming” of small children. Can a movement not form against a genuine child-health menace?
Before 2014, there was no women’s ski-jumping event at the Olympic Games. So ski jumper Lindsey Van (not to be confused with downhill racer Lindsey Vonn) joined with Procter & Gamble to shame the Olympic Committee into action.
Yes, P&G, the package-goods colossus that put flies on the eyes of Pakistani children.. In 2010, its Secret deodorant brand collaborated with Van in a Facebook campaign called “Let Her Jump,” generating wide public support for the cause. It was a small scale project with minimal budget, but it captured imaginations, generated activism and, within a year, saw the Olympic Committee relent. In the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, women for the first time jumped.
Is that a model? Obviously, to depend on Madison Avenue for healing is on the face of it an act of lunacy. Nonetheless, count me in.