RETHINKING BEAUTY
![](http://media.npr.org/programs/day/features/2007/mar/beauty/beauty_540.jpg)
nude but not crude
I was listening to this story on NPR's Day to Day about Dove's new "Pro-Age" advertising campaign which made me think of this essay from last month's The Atlantic Monthly.
The gist is this: Dove's new campaign may push the envelope on redefining notions of feminine beauty by including older women (nude, no less) in this new campaign but how much is this actually challenging our narrow social bias indeed about what an "ideal" body type looks like?
As Postrel notes in that Atlantic Monthly piece about an earlier Dove campaign,
- "The “real women” pictured in the thigh-cream billboards may not have looked like supermodels, but they were all young, with symmetrical faces, feminine features, great skin, white teeth, and hourglass shapes. Even the most zaftig had relatively flat stomachs and clearly defined waists. These pretty women were not a random sample of the population. Dove diversified the portrait of beauty without abandoning the concept altogether."
This isn't to dismiss Dove outright but it's to note that what they're doing is far less than revolutionary and more like a small nudge towards a more inclusive model of beauty that still stays comfortably within our expectations.
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