• by Barbara Lippert , Columnist, November 15, 2024

In a recent Nutrisystem commercial aimed at women over 50, a slim Marie Osmond, in her body suit and cowboy boots, jumps out of her tour bus and announces, “Aging sucks!” 

Immediately, she laughs uproariously, showing her big smile, as if to cover it up, or suggest, “Did I really say that?”

Then comes the pitch about Nutrisystem’s program that destroys belly fat.

While aging is no great shakes, many of the ads created to reach older women also “suck,” to use Marie’s word, each in its own cringe-worthy way.

But “Beauty Never Gets Old,” a recent Dove spot for its Beauty Bar soap, hits all the right notes. 

A visual feast, it’s clever, quirky, eccentric, delightful.

Of course, as a brand, Dove has been committed to the female self-esteem business since 2004, starting with its startling-for-the-time billboards showing “real women,” selected from a “wider range of beauty,” standing unretouched, stripped down to their white bras and panties.

Subsequently, The Dove Self-Esteem Project became the largest body confidence education provider in the world.

In this latest spot, there’s an interesting play on age here, celebrating the longevity of the Dove Beauty Bar (with its then unique solution of “one-quarter moisturizing cream”), which was introduced in the U.S. in 1957.  The idiosyncratic women highlighted in the spot appear to be around the same 67-year-old vintage.

The eye-popping production design provides a great backdrop for the array of female influencers shown in their eye-stopping outfits. They own the camera, and their confidence in their own skin jumps off the screen.

No words are spoken, but type on the screen reveals each user’s name -- and, rather than her age, how long she’s been soaping up with Dove’s beauty bar.  (Many seem to have been in life-long relationships with the bar.)

Created by Edelman, the spot opens with a gray-haired woman in a black top and leggings standing on her head. She sustains this advanced yoga pose as the camera moves on
to other women, other rooms. That includes the Joni Mitchell-type woman, her gray hair in braids, strumming on her guitar as she taps her silver sneaker. She’s been a user since 1958.

Despite Dove’s commitment to celebrating a wide range of beauty, “This has been a long time coming because, for the longest time, the beauty industry continued to perpetuate unachievable ideals,” said Divya Raghavan, senior brand director of Dove innovation and equity. “There’s a lot of stigma around aging, and a lot of older women [have been] invisible in the beauty conversation.”

The cuts are fluid, timed perfectly to the music, Megan Trainor’s “Me Too.” An inspired choice that keeps a pumpy rhythm, the song, with it’s refrain of “I’d want to be me, too”  is Trainor’s ode to self-love and full-figured bodies, from her 2016 album “Thank you.” (Her most familiar hit is “All About That Bass.”)

But “Me Too” was not without its own controversy. The song’s music video was taken down from social media hours after the single was released. On Snapchat, Trainor explained that the video had been edited, specifically to slim her waist, a move she had not approved. The un-photoshopped version of the video was released later in the week to much fanfare. The complication certainly dovetails with what the Unilever brand stands for.

And speaking of photoshop et al, this year, the brand updated The Dove Real Beauty Pledge to “vow that we will #KeepBeautyReal and never use AI to create or distort women’s images.”

With 90% of online content predicted to be AI-generated by 2025, Dove is planning to equip “creators, brands, and anyone using AI,” with the Real Beauty Prompt Playbook, a free tool to help create visual content that “widens the representation of beauty on the most popular generative AI tools.”

“Beauty Knows No Age” is a title that rightly flips the old beauty-contest myth “Beauty Knows No Pain” on its head, just as the yoga pose woman ends the spot by standing up.

It would be hard to be in the presence of these individual women, who take great joy in owning their scenes and the camera, and not smile.

And we get the message: These women are comfortable in their own skin and in their own soap.

Being comfortable in your skin, without a mention of wrinkles: that does not suck.