You’re more beautiful than you think — or so claims a new video from Dove, which already has more than 20 million views on YouTube.
The idea is simple enough. A woman describes herself to a sketch artist, then a stranger describes her to the same artist; repeat for several women — who, at the end, see the sketches side by side.
The results are clear: Other people think you’re much prettier than you think you are.
As one subject of the experiment notes tearfully, “Our self-perceptions are kind of harsh and unbecoming, when really that’s not how the world sees us.”
But what (aside from buying more Dove products, I guess) are we supposed to take away? Why are these women so down on themselves?
Can we — should we — teach our daughters how to avoid this, in Stuart Smalley’s words, “stinkin’ thinkin’?”
With all this talk about the tremendous accomplishments of young women and even the “end of men,” one wonders about the accuracy of Dove’s experiment. Are we just “leaning in” . . . to the mirror to examine skin blemishes?
Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and author of “One Nation Under Therapy,” finds the video very compelling but warns that it’s “bad science”: “They clearly had a point to make — that women devalue their own looks — and probably cherry-picked the women whose self-image yielded a less attractive portrait compared against the image described by a stranger.”
She also wonders why the comparison was to how strangers saw you. “Doesn’t it also matter a lot how you are ‘seen’ by people who know you?” The research shows, she says, “it is mostly your personality that dictates how you look to others.”
OK, it’s not exactly news that human beings can be superficial — or that women and girls obsess about their appearances in ways that men generally don’t. (One suspects that men might paint a more flattering picture of themselves than strangers would.)
But technology has made things worse, says Christine Rosen, who writes about technology and society for the New Atlantis. “Photoshop has made images of female perfection routine.And the ease with which we can now upload images of ourselves (on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) could also feasibly raise the stakes for appearance.”
Nor does she see this improving any time soon.
So what can we do so that our daughters don’t spend their lives obsessing over whether their chins protrude too much, or they have too many freckles, or their lips aren’t full enough? (Such were the concerns of the grown women in the video.)
Should we refrain from ever commenting on people’s appearances? Was President Obama only exacerbating the problem when he called California’s Kamala Harris the country’s “best looking” attorney general?
Rather than pretending that appearances don’t matter, says Satel, the key is to develop other traits in our children.
She mentions the importance of “resilience,” explaining: “Everyone fails, but if you see it as a catastrophe instead of learning from it,” then you’re not resilient.
In other words, a resilient girl is less likely to wind up like one of the hot messes so grimly displayed on the HBO show “Girls.”
Girls who are resilient are less likely to have to think about their looks all the time; as she puts it, “You can be objective and say, ‘My eyes are too close together, but so what?’”
What kind of teen girl would utter such a sentence? Probably the kind who realizes that her world needn’t revolve around boys.
Numerous studies have found a correlation for girls between the age of first sexual encounter and depression. The lower the age, the more likely they are to experience depression.
In fact, perhaps the best parents can do is make sure that their children — especially daughters — have enough to distract them from obsessing about the flaws in their appearances.
Whether it’s through academic achievements or athletic ones, our daughters can gain that all-important sense of resilience. Because self-confidence doesn’t really come from soap commercials.