Dear Friends:
First, a thank you to author Melinda Tankard Reist (Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualization of Girls) for alerting me to the article below. In follow up to yesterday's posting about Dove's "Real Beauty Campaign" this important article provides a larger, and sadly more honest perspective of what Dove's parent brand, Unilever, is up to. That agenda is apparently the "whitening" of humanity -- for profit of course.
Also please follow the important discussion about Unilever's Lynx/Axe brand. It would appear Unilever is of two minds on the matter of women/girls/beauty. Be advised: talk to your daughter before Unilever does!
Abolition!
Lisa
By: Layla Sayeed
guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 July 2010 10.00 BST
Stand up to Unilever's hypocrisy over skin-lightening
Unilever's backing of whiter beauty in India while its Dove brand urges self-esteem makes me ashamed to work in advertising.
Vaseline's homepage asks: "Do you see your skin the way we do? Your skin is amazing."
Well, it's clearly not so amazing if you're brown. Vaseline, a sub-brand of Unilever, has just launched a Facebook app in India that allows users to whiten their profile pictures. The app, which is designed to promote Vaseline's range of skin-lightening creams for men, promises to "transform your face on Facebook with Vaseline Men" in a campaign fronted by Bollywood actor Shahid Kapur. According to Pankaj Parihar of Omnicom, the global communications group behind the campaign, "the response has been pretty phenomenal".
The fact that the response has been "phenomenal" is sad but not surprising. While it might be hard for the tanorexics among us to understand, skin lightening is a huge, and extremely lucrative, industry. According to a report by Global Industry Analysts, it is predicted to reach $10bn by 2015.
And while skin-lightening products have traditionally been targeted at women, the beauty industry is growing increasingly excited about the financial rewards to be had by drumming up a bit of self-loathing in men. It's expected that sales of male skin-lightening products could reach similar levels of value sales as their female-targeted counterparts within five to 10 years. But men aren't the only demographic on the marketeers' strategic horizons: children are also fair game. An Indian Readership Survey in 2008 found that 12 to 14-year-olds accounted for 13% of the market.
It makes for pretty sickening reading. But what makes it even more nauseating is the fact that Vaseline is a sub-brand of Unilever, which also own brands like Dove. Dove, if you remember, set about saving our little girls from the beauty industry with their Campaign for Real Beauty. The much lauded campaign included inspirational films like Onslaught, which suggested "you talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does".
Hypocrisy is nothing new with Unilever. While Dove's multimillion-pound campaigns shunned stereotypes of women, Lynx (another Unilever brand) turned stereotyping women into something of an art form. In 2007, film-maker Rye Clifton created a mashup [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwDEF-w4rJk (note this starts out like the Onslaught ad circulated yesterday- Lisa)] of Unilever's Axe (Lynx) and Dove communications, which juxtaposed the different messages the two Unilever brands were putting into the market with disturbing effect. Apologists made the excuse that Dove and Axe are very different entities with different targets, different voices and, so, different values. . . .
For the rest of the article go to:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/16/unilever-hypocritical-promoting-skin-lightening
First, a thank you to author Melinda Tankard Reist (Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualization of Girls) for alerting me to the article below. In follow up to yesterday's posting about Dove's "Real Beauty Campaign" this important article provides a larger, and sadly more honest perspective of what Dove's parent brand, Unilever, is up to. That agenda is apparently the "whitening" of humanity -- for profit of course.
Also please follow the important discussion about Unilever's Lynx/Axe brand. It would appear Unilever is of two minds on the matter of women/girls/beauty. Be advised: talk to your daughter before Unilever does!
Abolition!
Lisa
By: Layla Sayeed
guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 July 2010 10.00 BST
Stand up to Unilever's hypocrisy over skin-lightening
Unilever's backing of whiter beauty in India while its Dove brand urges self-esteem makes me ashamed to work in advertising.
Vaseline's homepage asks: "Do you see your skin the way we do? Your skin is amazing."
Well, it's clearly not so amazing if you're brown. Vaseline, a sub-brand of Unilever, has just launched a Facebook app in India that allows users to whiten their profile pictures. The app, which is designed to promote Vaseline's range of skin-lightening creams for men, promises to "transform your face on Facebook with Vaseline Men" in a campaign fronted by Bollywood actor Shahid Kapur. According to Pankaj Parihar of Omnicom, the global communications group behind the campaign, "the response has been pretty phenomenal".
The fact that the response has been "phenomenal" is sad but not surprising. While it might be hard for the tanorexics among us to understand, skin lightening is a huge, and extremely lucrative, industry. According to a report by Global Industry Analysts, it is predicted to reach $10bn by 2015.
And while skin-lightening products have traditionally been targeted at women, the beauty industry is growing increasingly excited about the financial rewards to be had by drumming up a bit of self-loathing in men. It's expected that sales of male skin-lightening products could reach similar levels of value sales as their female-targeted counterparts within five to 10 years. But men aren't the only demographic on the marketeers' strategic horizons: children are also fair game. An Indian Readership Survey in 2008 found that 12 to 14-year-olds accounted for 13% of the market.
It makes for pretty sickening reading. But what makes it even more nauseating is the fact that Vaseline is a sub-brand of Unilever, which also own brands like Dove. Dove, if you remember, set about saving our little girls from the beauty industry with their Campaign for Real Beauty. The much lauded campaign included inspirational films like Onslaught, which suggested "you talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does".
Hypocrisy is nothing new with Unilever. While Dove's multimillion-pound campaigns shunned stereotypes of women, Lynx (another Unilever brand) turned stereotyping women into something of an art form. In 2007, film-maker Rye Clifton created a mashup [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwDEF-w4rJk (note this starts out like the Onslaught ad circulated yesterday- Lisa)] of Unilever's Axe (Lynx) and Dove communications, which juxtaposed the different messages the two Unilever brands were putting into the market with disturbing effect. Apologists made the excuse that Dove and Axe are very different entities with different targets, different voices and, so, different values. . . .
For the rest of the article go to:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/16/unilever-hypocritical-promoting-skin-lightening
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