Dove’s new campaign presents a brilliant self-esteem boosting challenge

For the past 10 years Dove and their “Real Beauty Campaign” have been on a total body positivity mission. From their ads featuring women of all sizes wearing nary a stitch of clothing on their awesome bods, to their viral “Real Beauty Sketches” video, Dove is making a concentrated effort to help us understand how beautiful each and every one of us is and how wrong our inner critic can be.

Now Dove is back with a new video that helps us to understand that the negative little voice inside our heads is actually totally warped. As the Huffington Post reports, Dove France created a video in which women are asked to carry a journal around and every time they have a negative thought re: their physical appearance, to write it down. Afterwards, those self-loathing comments were turned into dialogue for two actresses to speak to each other in a coffee shop. The women were a little hesitant to spew all that internal garbage at one another. One of them even asked the film crew, “I have to say that? But it’s horrible!”

Shortly thereafter, the women who initially wrote down the thoughts were invited to the coffee shop, where they sat at a table next to the actresses and eavesdropped on them repeating back all the negative chatter the women had written down. From “Your face looks like a bulldog” to “You’ve gotten fatter,” to “Don’t you feel horrible now? With those large thighs and your horse’s hips?” At a certain point, the women interrupted the actresses, explaining that what they were saying was “harsh” and violent.” Only by hearing someone else say all these awful things were the women fully able to realize how terribly they were treating themselves.

Dove ends the vid with the question “If it’s not acceptable to say to someone else, why say it to ourselves?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tM2Z0-zFcw

To combat these inner critics, Dove is encouraging us to share #OneBeautifulThought, a positive statement about our appearance as opposed to the negativity we usually direct toward ourselves. It’s a necessary wake-up call, and I can’t think of a woman who wouldn’t benefit from this thought experiment. Some women have already taken to Twitter to participate:

We think the women all around us are so insanely beautiful, it’s really time to direct some of that love back at ourselves.

[Image via]

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