Ad shows a black woman 'turning white' and Twitter is super mad

Dove has invited trouble for another advertisement, this time featuring racial discrimination. Read on to know what happened next

Dove is a people’s brand and enjoys a majoritarian favourable image. However, of late Dove has been messing up its advertising game and has managed to tarnish its public image. First it was the bottles shaped like the female body that backfired and now an latest ad which is literal whitewashing. The Dove advert is basically a GIF showing a black woman taking off her brown shirt before a bath and transitioning into a white woman – who then takes off her light-coloured skin to reveal a woman of colour in a shirt which is darker in shade. This created a furore on social media.

Over the weekend Dove’s parent company apologized, writing on Facebook and Twitter:


But the storm did not subside and Marissa Solan, a spokeswoman for Dove, went on to clarify that the GIF

Was intended to convey that Dove Body Wash is for every woman and be a celebration of diversity, but we got it wrong and, as a result, offended many people.

She added that Dove had removed the post and was “re-evaluating our internal processes for creating and reviewing content.” The critics on social media remained unimpressed by the company’s apology and bashed the company

And someone pointed out the soap manufacturing company’s tendencies to use such advertising that pertained to a very racist ideology:

Previously in a 2011 ad, Dove had advertised two women of colour, a white woman standing in front of “before” and “after” signs was also criticised.

And this one user decided to take matters in her hand:

Also Read: Dove introduces bottles shaped like female body types, Twitter asks if they’ve ever seen a human body

While Twitter was busy shaming Dove, some wondered if there was lack of diversity at Dove. But if you look at most cosmetics, fairness has always been equated with purity by default. So we don’t really know who is to blame for this gross discrimination.

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