About that Dove Beauty thing

My newsfeed is full of comments about Dove Real Beauty Sketches. I tried to watch it, but couldn’t get past the first three seconds. A woman with impossibly thin thighs—automatically triggering envy in 99.9% of female viewers—was whining about wanting fuller lips. It isn’t exactly a news flash that some women have lousy self-images, or that society tends to reward beauty (or whatever it is that we designate as such).

Every painting student of mine will eventually be asked to paint or draw a self-portrait. No working from photographs here: I will plop you in front of a mirror and insist you draw yourself. That’s pretty raw self-analysis, and so I’ve seen countless examples of how people perceive themselves.

A very few of their self-portraits have come close in self-abnegation to those Dove “real beauty” sketches. I’ve come to think the problem might actually be that hyper-attention to distressing detail is a stand-in for something more profound. There is something about their inner selves that dissatisfies them, but they express that through the superficial.

But the vast majority of self-portraits look an awful lot like the artists who did them. Neither excessively flattering nor excessively grotesque, they record their own real looks to the best of their abilities. Does this mean that artists have better self-images than most people, or does it mean that the Dove campaign is built on a lie?

Ethereally beautiful models who don’t like their own looks tend to live in places like New York. It is a city of façades, necessary because of its high concentration of population. “I was on the subway, and there was a gang on the train,” one of my kids told me recently. “Two children put their hands over their ears trying to not hear the racist profanity being spitted out. The mother told them to put their hands down. She was afraid they would draw attention to themselves and it would be dangerous.” That’s an extreme example of the kind of protective coloration assumed all the time in a city, but it has a distorting effect on what one perceives and what is real.

High school self-portrait from life by Matt Menzies, now an undergraduate at RISD.

There’s still room in this summer’s Maine painting workshops, where we will teach you to love yourself, and where it doesn’t matter what you wear. Check here for more information.