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In reply to the discussion: What the Fuck was Dove Soap Trying to Convey with this Ad? [View all]IronLionZion
(45,442 posts)instead of tanning beds or orange spray tan.
I'm brown and I've used Dove soap, face wash, and shampoo for many years without changing race.
There are racist soap ads out there that promise to whiten you up but this Dove ad isn't it. It was just poorly executed with the order of the women and while the ethnically ambiguous tan woman was great and deliberately left out by the outraged pieces written about it, adding an East Asian or Native American woman might have helped make their case better. Or changing the order of women.
Whether the third woman was Indian, Middle Eastern, Latina, or mixed, I'm more disappointed by the people on our side deliberately pretending she doesn't exist as is all too often the case with brown people. As if everything is black and white with no shades of beige in between.
The ad makers probably meant well but their team likely wasn't diverse enough to know how it would play to diverse audiences.