Brand Story We Love: Selfie

Girls have complicated relationships with their bodies. So do their mothers.

Selfie, an 8 minute film by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Cynthia Wade (Shelter Dogs), unpacks some of the universal angst every daughter has ever felt no matter how old she gets.

Marking the 10th anniversary of Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty,” Selfie was made in partnership with Dove and Sundance Institute. It asks girls and their others to create “selfies” that celebrate the feature they’d secretly thought made them less beautiful.

Why we love it:

• The relationships feel familiar to many women, a reflection of real conversations every woman has had with her mother and/or her daughter
• It understands that good storytelling is never about a thing, even a product, but always about people
• We are a fly on the wall when we see the faces of the girls and women transform the moment they see beauty in themselves where they did not knot it existed
• It embraces both humor and poignancy, often within moments of each other
• We see the effort that goes into pulling this off, the huge team that moves in to ready the photographs and the director coaching the girls on photography
• It features compelling, quirky and very real, flawed and charming characters

Any down side?

• The campaign has its detractors, but we’re not among them.
• It’s true, the online world can be a dangerous place and some selfies see kids putting themselves at risk.

But selfies are a very real part of a teenage girl’s life and it’s not up to a soap company to put the genie back in the bottle. We think this can open up conversations between mothers and daughters about beauty. And while they’re parenting, they can raise the online safety issue (visit Red Hood Project for more info), like every good parent should.