Dove advertisement: It is not just beauty & peace

Advertising’s great sleight of hand is to make you feel inadequate without consuming what it’s selling. It ever so gently and artily or ever so obnoxiously and blatantly makes you feel insufficient in your skin without that television, that car, that cream, that spotless face.

So what is the “You are more beautiful than you think?” Dove ad — presumably viewed by over seven million people on YouTube — saying? It has the arty, soft-focus quotient in place — an airy San Francisco loft where an FBI-trained forensic artist sketches women.

His back is turned to them, he just listens to how they describe their faces and makes a sketch, and then he makes another sketch on the basis of someone else’s descriptions of them.

Now, the twist: the second portrait, the ad suggests, is far more beautiful than the first, self-described one. How shallow is your self-image?

It is the oldest rule in the book; Unilever only packages it in shiny paper. For all the ad’s moralising, a woman ends up wondering: isn’t her image of herself good enough? Does she have to see herself through the eyes of others — a pretty stranger she met in the hall, a boyfriend in denim jacket? Dove sells the familiar template.

The new one would be: I’m as beautiful as I think, stop telling me how beautiful I’m or should be. But that is too much for a soap to say.