Last November, when you Googled the phrase “ugly Black woman,” Vanessa Rochelle Lewis’s photograph was the second to come up.
“Which I’m offended by,” says Lewis, a Bay Area–based artist and writer, “since I’m an Aries and I like to be number one in everything.”
The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty is a worldwide marketing/public relations campaign launched in 2004 that includes advertisements, video, workshops, sleepover events and the publication of a book and the production of a play. The principle behind the campaign is to celebrate the natural physical variation embodied by all women and inspire them to have the confidence to be comfortable with themselves.
In its thirteenth year, the annual Miss Talavera Bruce beauty pageant is held in unlikely surroundings: a women’s prison in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Instituto Penal Talavera is the only maximum-security women’s prison in the city with inmates serving life sentences for murder, fraud and drug trafficking.
The Photoshop action — a downloadable file that applies an action with a single click — is aimed at art directors who may be creating such ads. The action, which was disseminated on Reddit and other places where Dove thought such art directors might visit, promised to add a skin glow effect, but actually reverted the image to its original state.