Are you average or beautiful? Viral ad show women's choice

(Dove/via YouTube)


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SALT LAKE CITY — Would you describe yourself as beautiful?

Dove's launched another campaign on beauty perception, and this time it's asking women to literally choose to be beautiful.

An astonishing 96 percent of women don’t believe they’re beautiful, according to several studies done by Dove. The company launched its #ChooseBeautiful campaign this week to help women see that feeling beautiful is a choice they can make every day.

Dove set up signs with the words “beautiful” and “average” above doors in San Francisco, Shanghai, Delhi, London and Sao Paulo, and captured the results as women had to choose which door to walk through.

While one mother proudly dragged her daughter over to the “beautiful” door, most women in the video chose to walk through the “average” door.

“It was my choice,” one woman says of why she walked through the “average” door. “And now I will question myself for the next few weeks, maybe (a) month.”


Feeling beautiful is one of those choices that women should feel empowered to make for themselves, every day.

–Dove statement


One woman who chose the “beautiful” door described it as a “triumphant feeling.”

“Women make thousands of choices each day — related to their careers, their families, and, let’s not forget, themselves,” Dove said in a statement, according to mashable.com. “Feeling beautiful is one of those choices that women should feel empowered to make for themselves, every day.”

Dove encourages women who don't feel beautiful to practice mindfulness, a therapeutic technique used to help a person focus on the present moment and accept their thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations.

#poll

"There’s growing literature on the impact of mindfulness on body image, body confidence, body awareness and lessening body criticism," Dr. Nancy Etcoff says in a video on the #ChooseBeautiful Tumblr page. "People have a tendency to look in the mirror and always zero in on their faults. Mindfulness really helps people to look at their body in a positive way, be aware of and appreciate their body and to view it with compassion and kindness.”

This isn’t Dove’s first time creating a campaign around beauty perception. It also created the “Real Beauty Sketches” campaign in 2013 that asked women to describe themselves to a sketch artist.

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LifestyleU.S.
Tracie Snowder

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