For over 20 years, Dove’s Real Beauty campaign has inspired a worldwide conversation about beauty standards, promoting self-esteem and body confidence across global cultures. You’ll always catch a glimpse of the iconic legacy campaign, whether you’re in Dubai’s dazzling Marina district or London’s Piccadilly Circus—Real Beauty is everywhere in our marketing arenas—and for good reason.
This week, the brand won the prestigious Grand Prix in the Media Lions category at Cannes for its latest Real Beauty campaign, celebrating and facilitating a more inclusive vision of beauty in the AI age of distortion and perfection.
Dove’s Real Beauty campaign reimagined for the AI age
Dove’s viral “Evolution” ad was the turning point that brought the Real Beauty campaign into the global spotlight, transforming Dove’s message into a powerful cultural statement about beauty and authenticity. The short film highlighted how modern media often constructs unrealistic beauty ideals through the use of makeup, styling and extensive digital manipulation.
Now, Dove reimagined its 21-year-old campaign, anchoring the concept in the new challenges posed by deepfake imagery and generative AI in the modern day.
The film, “Real Beauty Redefined for the AI Era,” has garnered over 4 billion impressions online since its debut last year, immersing audiences in the unsettling realities that such technologies can create. Generative AI and deepfake imagery frequently produce hyperidealized versions of beauty that are so heavily perfected, they verge on the uncanny and inhuman.
Dove’s viral film cast an important spotlight on this rapid rise of AI-generated content and its growing influence in distorting representative and authentic beauty standards. Set to the soft strains of “Pure Imagination,” the feature opens with a startling prediction: “By 2025, AI will generate 90% of online content.”
The film shows multiple iterations of how AI engines have begun to redefine the concept of “real beauty,” alongside news reports documenting the trend of women using generative AI tools to alter and recreate artificial versions of themselves. Through powerful storytelling, Dove challenges viewers to question the evolving definition of beauty in an increasingly synthetic digital world.
Dove prompts AI to challenge beauty biases and redefine standards
Generative AI models, such as those used for creating images or text, learn patterns from vast datasets during their training phase. These datasets often reflect existing cultural biases or narrow ideas about concepts like beauty because they’re based on real-world data gathered from the internet, media and other sources.
Alongside its revitalized campaign, Dove began using prompts such as “according to the Dove Real Beauty Campaign” in AI image generators—finding that it encouraged more inclusive visual outputs. That led the brand to partner with Pinterest to debut an AI-driven feature that now allows women to create beauty standards that reflect their own identities.
Dove also launched a Prompt Playbook to help users with their creations using the Real Beauty plug-in. The guide includes practical tips for generating images across leading generative AI programs, along with a glossary designed to encourage more inclusive prompting.
Dove and Pinterest are retraining AI to celebrate what beauty means to you
The feature allows users to create personalized shareable videos and photos and simultaneously helps retrain Pinterest’s AI algorithm. Visitors can dive into an infinite gallery filled with real people, awe-inspiring landscapes, rich cultural moments and expressions of happiness, choosing images that align with their individual beauty ideals to craft a unique visual story.
Pinterest has also been on its own journey to facilitate a more inclusive platform in the age of generative AI. The platform has invested in new innovative technologies and enhanced search functions that allow users to filter results by various body shapes and sizes, promoting greater representation of diverse physiques and identities.
In an age where AI threatens to distort beauty standards, Dove reaffirms its unwavering commitment to authenticity—refusing to manipulate women’s images with artificial technology and continuing its mission to celebrate real beauty and empower women worldwide.
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