15 March 2006

BEIRUT: When Tala Barrage was a kid, she used to watch her mother prepare for evenings out, getting dressed and putting on makeup. "When she was ready, she always looked perfect," says Barrage, a 46 year old interior designer who was born in Lebanon and currently lives in the U.K. For Barrage, her mother defined the very notion of beauty itself.

She also thought Georgina Rizk, Lebanon's first and only Miss Universe, "was absolutely astonishing, kind of magical. Catherine Deneuve had and still has a smooth velvet beauty. I was fascinated by Faten Hamama," she adds, because of her "beauty, wit and talent."

Marwa Abdel-Jawad, on the other hand, grew up admiring the Western models, actresses and singers she saw on television and in magazines. "Most of them were tall, very thin, with blonde hair and fair skin. They seemed perfect in every way," says Jawad, a 21-year-old Saudi national, recently married, who is studying communications and media studies.

"When I was younger," she adds, "none of my family members or friends seemed beautiful to me. Why? Because they [didn't] look like those perfect singers, models and actresses I used to see in newspapers and on TV."

There is nearly a generation between Barrage and Jawad. Yet they both speak to the ways in which pop culture, the media and the industries of fashion and advertising are contributing more and more to cultural stereotypes about feminine beauty that are damaging because they are inauthentic and unattainable.

Both women are also part of a new campaign attempting to pummel those stereotypes into dust by presenting the public with role models that are more real, which is to say, pleasantly flawed.

In the Arab world specifically, a beautiful woman is deemed to be so if she is young and thin with straight, lustrous black hair and clear, pale skin. She is expected to be groomed within an inch of her life regular blow drys, de rigeur manicure-pedicure sessions, layers of makeup.

For the more ambitious (and more advanced in terms of socioeconomic class), maybe she's gone in for a nose job, a boob job, some botox, even a new chin or cheekbones. She is, in other words, a clone, her femininity reduced to artifice.

Given that norm, it will be quite interesting to judge the impact of a new advertising campaign by Dove, that purveyor of beauty products owned by Unilever, which launched last month and will be spreading through the Gulf and the Levant on billboards and buses as well as through print ads and Web sites.

The ads, part of Dove's global "Campaign for Real Beauty," feature images of Barrage (with her oh so unfashionable silver hair) and Jawad (with her mocha skin and long nose), along with images of Susan Iliyan (a 29 year old Palestinian living in Dubai with a wild mess of unruly hair) and Jouhaina Boudiwan (a 34 year old Lebanese interior designer who has never been trim enough to squeeze into a size eight, thank you very much).  

The campaign has already sparked controversy in New York and London, where photographs of healthy-sized twentysomethings stripped down to their white cotton underwear were slapped onto high-profile billboards.

One editorial scoffed, "Really, the only time I want to see a thigh that big is in a bucket with bread crumbs on it."

According to an article in Newsweek last August, another critic foretold that the campaign would "doom Dove as the brand for fat girls."

Still, because the campaign generated so much heated debate, it was something of an unprecedented PR coup. Now the company is taking its strategy global, with similar campaigns tailored to the sensitivities of Asia and the Arab world.

To be fair, the campaign stems from serious research and a commissioned study with Harvard's Nancy Etcoff and Susie Orbach of the London School of Economics.

It reads more like an academic treatise than an ad brief replete with a "literature review" that was "designed to review current public knowledge on the topic [of beauty] and to isolate any gaps that might exist in the discourse."

The report, dubbed a white paper, surveyed some 3,000 women and found that only 2 percent were comfortable describing themselves as beautiful. In Saudi Arabia which, perhaps problematically, was used to represent the entire Middle East in the study nine out of 10 women said they were unhappy about their physical attributes, and 36 percent between the ages of 15 and 17 were already considering plastic surgery.

Dove's campaign in the Middle East, which is being done in a mix of Arabic and English, is notably more conservative than its Western counterpart. Barrage, Jawad, Iliyan and Boudiwan are all fully and tastefully clothed (Jawad, in fact, is wearing a scarf). Yet the overall vibe vivacious is the same.

Will it work? And is broadening the definition of beauty as opposed to prioritizing other factors like education, financial independence and professional achievement really the best way to empower women?

At the end of the day, it's an ad campaign. Dove is in fierce competition with such brands as Nivea and Neutrogena, and that plays out on the regional as well the international stage.

The "Campaign for Real Beauty" may want to raise women's self esteem, but there's also a cold logic to that.

A confident and comfortable consumer is more likely to be loyal to a brand than one who is hysterical, desperate and depressed.

Still, given how thoroughly global the advertising industry has become, it may be the best realm to subvert from within.