Hips, breasts, skin, thighs - there’s no shortage of body parts to fuss over, thanks to a market saturated with solutions. Now, a shadier part of our anatomy is being inaugurated to our stream of self-conscious: the armpit.
With their Ultimate Go Sleeveless campaign, Dove has remixed deodorant as we know it into something that doesn’t merely limit itself to reducing sweat and odour: it also promises to make your pits pretty.
Tapping into a study that shows 93 per cent of women consider their armpits unattractive, the Wall Street Journal reports, the new blend is loaded with moisturizers, vitamins E and F promising to leave skin “softer, smoother, and ready to reveal in just five days.”
But when were our armpits not “ready to reveal”?
And why is Dove bringing our attention to something that, much like wrinkly elbows and big toes, is generally accepted as an aspect of our bodies that simply doesn’t happen to be as appealing as others?
“If we don't continue to invent products that improve consumers' lives, we'll have trouble growing our business,” says Kevin Hochman, a marketing director for Procter & Gamble Co.'s female beauty brands, told the Wall Street Journal. True, consumers have over 300 deodorant products to choose from, all promising the same thing.
The ad features a woman cutting off the sleeves of what appears to be every blouse she owns. Overwhelmed with emancipation from her once-ugly pits, she also decides that no, she won’t opt for a blazer today.
But somewhere amidst the sleeve liberation, something does not compute.
Dove made waves internationally a few years back with their “Real Beauty” campaign, most notably with the 2006 Dove Evolution advertisement that reveals a time-lapse of the arduous hair, makeup and PhotoShop process that makes a model billboard-worthy. The underlying message - besides “buy our product” - is that beauty as portrayed by magazines and billboards is unattainable without digital enhancement, whilst the whole campaign preaches being confident in our skin. The ad has since gone viral with over 12 million views on YouTube.
Now, seven years later the folks at Dove seem to be contradicting themselves by creating a problem zone for women that isn’t already part the litany of flaws to cover up. “Any marketer has to be careful of appearing to create a problem that doesn’t really exist. You can suffer a backlash if you do that,” says consumer products expert Jonathan Asher.
While Dove is already experiencing a backlash for this just-released product – as the blog Styleite asks, “Are people really that upset about their armpits?” – the armpit as a concern is nothing new for women in India, where skin-lightening creams are already a part of the beauty regimen
One ad for a brand of skin whitening cream from Singapore, featuring a slew of guys shuddering at the thought of dark pits, was taken as a joke among Western audiences when it went viral in 2005. Now, thanks to Dove, the armpits concern is making its way west, but this time it’s not a joke.
Are armpits a point of concern? Should we bother beautifying a part of our body that spends the majority of our lives hidden?
Editor's Note: Due to an editing error, the original version of this story didn't cite the Wall Street Journal as the original source. This version has been updated.
