Dove's Real Beauty Sketches: You Are More Beautiful Than You Think

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpaOjMXyJGk

When the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty launched in 2004, women worldwide were stunned at the candid, authentic nature of the brand's advertisements. A series of commercials promised to depict real women — as in, ladies literally picked from off the street — and they soon flooded our favorite TV programs, serving as much-needed reality checks among Hollywood's impossible-to-attain ideal.

Nine years since the campaign's launch, Dove published a video on its YouTube account titled "Dove Real Beauty Sketches", a three-minute ode to women's own natural beauty.

It's no surprise that women are their own worst beauty critics. To counter this, Dove brought in an FBI-trained forensic artist to blindly render two different portraits of participating women — one in which the woman describes her own features, and another in which she, in turn, gets described. It's also no surprise that the self portrait is much less beautiful, happy, and open than the portrait that is relayed by another person.

True to Dove form, the video leaves you with the powerful message that you are literally more beautiful than you think. "We spend a lot of time as women analyzing and trying to fix the things that aren't quite right," said one participant. "We should spend more time appreciating the things that we do like."