Dove's Short Film Reveals The Painfully Honest Way Teenage Girls View Themselves
"I would have never guessed you did that in the mirror," her mom replies.
The above is from Dove's new ad campaign called "Selfie," which premiered yesterday at the Sundance Film Festival as a 7-minute documentary.
The beauty company looks at teenage girls and their relationships with their mothers and themselves as they navigate the trend of taking selfies, and the ways we alter and adjust our image to create the perfect, seemingly "natural," reflection of ourselves in a photo.
The girls are shown as being frustrated trying to take a selfie that they're happy with, while the mothers realize that the way they internalize their own body issues affects their daughters.
Both mothers and daughters were asked to take a selfie that highlighted the features they disliked the most, the ones they'd usually try to hide in photos.
Then they attended an event where their selfies were blown up and posted in a photo gallery.
The goal is for the women to "redefine their own beauty and see that insecurity often lies beneath the personal snapshots," ABC News reports.
Dove says its own research found that 62% of women feel they are responsible for influencing their own definition of beauty and that 55% of women believe social media now plays a larger role in influencing the beauty conversation than traditional media.
This is one of several Dove Real Beauty campaigns. In the past, the beauty company created a viral ad in which a hired FBI-trained forensic sketch artist drew a woman as she described herself, and then drew her as a total stranger described her. As expected, the results were dramatically different.
Here's "Selfie" in full: