Dove’s Reverse Selfie speaks about the harmful effects of social media

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Unilever’s Dove soap launched a new campaign in Canada, to raise awareness about how social media harms the dignity of pre-adolescent girls. The brand has recently released a film titled “Reverse Selfie”. This film pleads to the viewers to help them to undo all the social media’s damaging effects on self-confidence and self-respect, which had increased in huge numbers during this pandemic.

Through this campaign, the brand wants people to have a “Selfie Talk” with their loved ones to explain how image manipulation on social media platforms creates unrealistic beauty standards. To put an end to this, Dove introduced a microsite with a downloadable confidence kit for parents and teachers.

Dove enlisted support from Lizzo, a singer and body confidence advocate to help them to reach their aim of making social media a more positive and safe experience for girls so that they could redefine the public perception of beauty.

This campaign marks an extension of the brand’s landmark “Campaign for Real Beauty”, to help women and children to build self-confidence in themselves. Previously Dove had a series in IGTV created by Lena Waithe, which mainly targeted teens as they went through adolescence and also had a lot of issues related to body image.

This film “ Reverse Selfie”, shows a rewound view of a young girl who is seen to be putting makeup and using photo-editing apps to enhance their beauty before posting them on to the social media platforms, through this they aim to get acceptance amongst their peer groups. The film ends with a strong message for the viewers, that is to have “the Selfie Talk” with a girl you love to fight against the negative impact of social media. This project is evocative of Dove’s short film, “A Selfie”, which was released by the brand three years ago. This mainly focused on giving awareness about how social media images can be staged.

According to the latest surveys done by Dove, it was found that 80% of Canadian girls used filters and apps to change their appearance by the age of 13. Most of them have an opinion that they would feel more confident if images on social media more accurately reflect the way they look in their real lives.

Dove also encourages more people to use the confidence kit. This 32 – page booklet outlines how children feel when they spend most of their time on social media and it also motivates parents and teacher to initiate a “Selfie Talk” to help children to change social media into a more positive experience.

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