The company behind brands like Dove soap and Sure deodorant will ban excessive model photoshopping and remove the word “normal” from advertising for beauty products in its latest response to social and environmental concerns.
Unilever said it would eliminate “all digital changes in body shape, size, proportion and skin color” from its advertising. Photoshop’s ban will cover Unilever ads, as well as influencers paid by the company to promote products.
The removal of the word “normal” from the packaging will affect at least 200 products and will be completed in one year, responding to criticisms that corporate conceptions of standards can be exclusive, especially if designed in terms of a single racial or demographic group.
Consumer products company FTSE 100 said it also intends to use “more natural, biodegradable and regenerative ingredients in our product portfolio”.
The movements occur at the moment when Unilever tries to position itself as an ethical brand in its vast portfolio of products, which ranges from Sunsilk shampoo to Domestos bleach and marmite paste. He set a science-based goal of producing net zero carbon emissions by 2039 and outlined ambitions to reduce the amount of plastic used in its packaging.
Sunny Jain, president of Unilever for beauty and personal care products, said that consumers are increasingly rewarding brands that act on environmental and social issues. He said the personal beauty campaign would make the company more successful.
The company also promised to increase its activist marketing, “taking a position on the issues that we know consumers care about and communicating this to consumers.”
Unilever’s Ben & Jerry’s ice cream brand has embraced social issues as part of its marketing. Last summer, Ben & Jerry’s criticized the UK government’s policies on refugees crossing the English Channel, drawing the ire of conservative party politicians, and expressed support for the Black Lives Matter protests. In January, the company announced that it would launch Crown Fund UK, an initiative that aims to prevent discrimination around black hairstyles.
Unilever’s beauty and care division is one of the largest advertisers in the world, spending between $ 4 billion and $ 5 billion annually. In January, it pledged to combat advertising stereotypes and increase spending on companies run by women or underrepresented groups from € 300 million to € 2 billion a year.
However, it has faced criticism for its role in perpetuating harmful conceptions of beauty. Last year, it changed the brand of a whitening cream sold in India from “Fair and Lovely” to “Glow and Lovely”, but continues to sell it, despite claims that its existence propagates discriminatory attitudes. “The product has never been and is not a skin lightening cream,” says Unilever on its website.
The move to ban unrealistic photo editing comes eight years after some Unilever brands highlighted the problem. In 2013, Dove soap ran an advertising campaign that urged designers not to “manipulate our perceptions of real beauty”. He also created a fake photo editing tool that promised to “beautify” the images, but actually reverted them to their unedited state.
In 2016, Unilever announced a change to brands like Lynx, a deodorant brand known as Ax in most markets outside the UK, away from advertisements that were based on female stereotypes that were regularly criticized as misogynists.
Jain said the company was “committed to combating harmful norms and stereotypes and shaping a broader and more inclusive definition of beauty.”
“We know that removing the ‘normal’ from our products and packaging will not solve the problem alone, but it is an important step,” he said.