The Dove Real Beauty campaign celebrates 20 years with a commitment to forgo AI in advertising

For fans of brands that feature models of all shapes and sizes, including Parade, Savage x Fenty, and Summersalt, it may come as a surprise that a generation ago, it was rare to find models in ads who looked like they’d ever been in the same room as a carbohydrate.

But in 2004, it was a novelty when Dove, the Unilever brand, introduced its Dove Real Beauty campaign, which eschewed professional models to feature women of varying sizes, ages, and ethnicities.

“If the fad becomes a trend…it has the potential to fundamentally change decades of image-making on Madison Avenue,” proclaimed an article in the New York Times in 2005 that noted some brands were following Dove’s inclusive lead. “But that is a big if indeed.”

One brand that didn’t waver is Dove itself, which has been iterating the campaign ever since and is marking the twentieth anniversary with a look back, and a look forward.

Standards deviation: The brand conducted a global study with more than 33,000 respondents, including 2,747 in the US, to gauge how expectations may have shifted when it comes to beauty standards.

There are some signs of improvement, even if they’re far from causes for celebration.

• Asked if “the media and advertising set an unrealistic standard of beauty that most women can’t ever achieve,” this year a healthy majority of women in the US, 69%, agreed, but that’s down from 81% who thought so in 2004, according to the study.

On the other hand, by some measures, respondents think that being conventionally attractive puts the thumb on the scale even more now than it did two decades ago:

• Asked if they agreed with the statement, “Women who are beautiful have greater opportunities in life,” 66% of US women agreed, more than the 51% who agreed in 2004.

AI of the beholder: One step the company is taking to mark the Real Beauty anniversary is declaring that it will never use AI-generated models rather than real people in advertising; Dove claims it’s the first beauty brand to make this commitment.

“At Dove, we seek a future in which women get to decide and declare what real beauty looks like—not algorithms,” CMO Alessandro Manfredi said in a statement. “We will not stop until beauty is a source of happiness, not anxiety, for every woman and girl.”