Perpetuating Myths: Dove and the Cost of Beauty

Recently you may have seen an advertisement for skincare brand Dove which links mental illness, specifically anorexia nervosa, to social media. You know the score: impossible beauty standards promoted online are causing young girls to over-exercise and starve themselves.

It’s an emotional watch. We see a young, blonde girl change from being a happy and carefree child to an isolated, unhappy teen — all as a direct result of social media. We watch her viewing online content that persuades her that she needs to lose weight, to be thinner, to be a different shape, until finally we see her in hospital.

Look, I don’t think anyone could argue that social media has been an unalloyed good for humanity. Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and the rest have persuaded many of us that our lives are not as fun or colourful or beautiful as one person or another behind our tiny screens. Social media has divided us. It has made us angry. It has caused toxic people to find other toxic people. It has even facilitated and strengthened dangerous political forces.

On the flip side there are of course some positives, as there usually are with new technology. Communities of like-minded people with benign interests have come together. Long lost friends have been reunited. I certainly would never have found much of a readership for this blog without the artist formerly known as Twitter.

But if you’re familiar with Anorexia Myths you probably know that I am not a big fan of the current narrative around social media and eating disorders. I don’t believe that social media can cause anorexia nervosa. And this advert gives the impression that it does.

It’s the same idea that’s been bubbling away for decades, of course. With each generation it gets slightly repackaged. First it was skinny models in magazines that caused anorexia. Then it was television. Now it’s social media that miraculously bestows on young girls the ability to override the body’s inbuilt survival mechanisms and starve themselves, sometimes to death.

As so often with anorexia nervosa, the people behind this advert have probably not thought about this terribly hard. They have taken things at face value and drawn the wrong conclusion. So I will say this again, a bit louder for those at the back: wanting to look slim like your favourite influencer is not the same as having an uncontrollable desire to starve yourself to the point of emaciation, even death.

These two things are not two sides of one coin. They are different things. One is a reaction to seeing an image on a screen, in a magazine or on television. The other is probably an inbuilt starvation response, a biological reaction to the body expending more calories than it is taking in.

And the advert’s main message around social media is not the only anorexia myth that it promotes. Yes, young blonde girls develop anorexia nervosa. But so do young blond boys. And boys and girls of any hair colour or any ethnicity, of course. And people who are no longer boys or girls. And women who’ve gone through childbirth or the menopause. And people who are now in their final decades.

Anorexia nervosa can affect anyone at any stage of life. If you are not a blonde little girl, don’t assume that you are safe from anorexia.

Look, this campaign may be well-intentioned. And to be fair to Dove, it is one of the few brands that has consistently challenged the standard, modern ideas of beauty. Its website homepage features a woman with vitiligo, and it also features (horror of horrors) female armpit hair! Yay to that. Historically, Dove adverts have depicted women of all shapes, sizes and colours. That is, of course, a good thing.

But I’m afraid on this they’ve got it wrong. This advert perpetuates stereotypes which are unhelpful. It continues the myth that anorexia nervosa is something that silly little white girls do because they want to be pretty.

This is so far from the truth that it makes me want to 😱.

Look, it’s true that the path to anorexia nervosa can start with body dissatisfaction, which of course can start with spending time on social media. But that doesn’t make social media the cause. Body dissatisfaction fuelled by social media can lead to anorexia if someone goes into energy deficit and has a biological predisposition, but so can all sorts of things, things that have nothing to do with ‘beauty’ — illness, dental work, a growth spurt, playing sport without fuelling sufficiently and so on.

There is also no doubt that so-called ‘pro ana’ content is unhelpful to people who are already unwell. Social media providers should take more responsibility for this and perhaps this could be tackled in law. I’m sceptical that these changes in the virtual world would make much difference in the real world though. After all, this is an illness that will leap on anything and twist it into a reason why you can’t recover: a comment from your gran, calories on menus, that skinny girl you just saw walking her dog… (You can recover in spite of all these things by the way.)

Far better to tackle the illness robustly in treatment so that people have the tools to combat the insidious internal messaging of anorexia. Yes, it would be wonderful if we could change society, and well done to Dove for challenging modern ideas of beauty, but change like that takes decades, perhaps even longer, and that doesn’t help people who are ill in the here and now. And, I’d argue, that perpetuating myths around anorexia, specifically the myth about little blonde girls wanting to be pretty, is counterproductive, even harmful.

And finally, although Dove may have had their hearts in the right place, ultimately this is a marketing exercise; it’s about selling products and making money for Dove’s shareholders. And using a serious, sometimes deadly, illness to promote a brand and shift bottles of shampoo and body lotion to me just feels a bit, well, ugly.