You ARE Beautiful: Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches shows us what we really think

When James Blunt crooned ‘You’re Beautiful, You’re Beautiful’, my heart would melt as I actually listened to the lyrics. Not that I felt the same but it was nice to have that song blast through my radio at times. As it turns out, only 4% of women in the world consider themselves beauty according to Dove’s Global Real Beauty Study in 2010.

In an effort to show women that they are beautiful in the eyes of others and shouldn’t be their own worst critic, Dove’s latest beauty campaign enlisted the help of Gil Zamora, an FBI trained forensic artist who has used his trademark Compositure™ Methodology to draw over 3,000 sketches during his 28-year career.

The film documented Zamora creating composite sketches of seven women who were hidden behind a curtain, so he couldn’t see what they looked like, and he used their self-descriptions as the basis of his drawings. Prior to their session with the forensic artist, each of the women were unexpectedly asked to spend a short period of time with a stranger without being told why. Zamora then drafted sketches from the stranger’s depictions. Most of the sketches drafted from the stranger’s point of view showed a more beautiful, happier and frequently more accurate portrayal of the women and further demonstrates that, when it comes to how they look the biggest beauty pressure is the pressure they put on themselves.

“When I was asked to be a part of the film for Dove, I never imagined how different the two sketch portrayals would be” said Gil Zamora, forensic artist. “What has stayed with me are the emotional reactions the women had when they viewed the composite sketches hung side by side. I think many of these brave women realised that they had a distorted self-perception that had affected parts of their lives in significant ways”.

Watch the Dove Real Beauty Sketches campaign now