Camera Shy: What the Dove Ads are Trying to Say about Real Beauty

My aversion to being photographed began way before I could pronounce the word insecurity or comprehend the devastation of a bad hair day. Back when I was still in single digits, my poor mother would drag me to the local Woolworth’s for my annual portrait sitting—you know, the kind with the acetate backdrop and weary-looking lensman. Maybe it was simply the start of my allergy to cheap fabric, but Mom had to bribe me with fried clams and a sundae from the soda fountain to stop my squirming as soon as I saw that backdrop.

Things haven’t changed much since then. I still avoid photographers (by photographers, I mean friends and family members armed with iPhones). I rarely update my Facebook page with new visuals of myself. And I’m the only one of my far-flung group of friends who still refuses to Skype. To put it bluntly, I can’t stand the way I look through a lens. Any lens.

I’d never really given much thought to my “photophobia” (which at this point borders on photo-psychosis) until this weekend, when I and more than 26 million other people watched the Dove Real Beauty Sketches video on YouTube. In it, a former forensic artist whips up two sketches of several “real” women. He bases the first one on the subject’s description of her own facial features. He creates the second drawing with the help of a third party, someone the subject has just met. In every case, the first drawing is dramatically less flattering than the second one. The takeaway: Women are hard on themselves. No kidding.

Give me a photo of myself and, like many of us, I will zero in on my flaws. “Jeez, I look like a whale. See that double chin? Check out that over-plucked eyebrow. What is UP with those pores on my nose? Oh boy, my hair is getting thinner. Wish the rest of me would.” At times, my confidence level has been directly linked to how I see myself in these shots, because this is how I imagine others must see me. Never mind that boyfriends and girlfriends alike tell me how pretty I am, that I’m blessed with great skin, lovely eyes, a winning smile. Never mind. Because they’re just being nice, right?

I suppose this same thinking is why the Dove video hit a nerve with so many women. Because while it hurts to be criticized by others, it’s absolutely devastating when you realize that the person who treats you the most cruelly is yourself. We ought to know better by now.

In any case, I should know better. After all, I’ve been a beauty editor and writer for years. I understand just how fickle the camera can be, and that beauty lies in places and planes it can’t always capture. I also have countless cover-ups, remedies, professionals, and procedures at my disposal. So why wallow in such shallow waters?

My mother passed away nearly a year ago, leaving boxes of photographs for me to sort through, something I hadn’t been willing to tackle until recently. To lay your whole life out on the bedroom floor can be gut-wrenching, to say the least. I would be lying if I said that some of the angst I felt didn’t stem from the bowl cut I had when I was five, or the pimples that threatened to colonize my entire face when I was eleven. And who the heck picked out that mud-brown corduroy Garanimals ensemble, anyway?

But something else happened while I was sifting through those piles from the past. Not only did I have to admit that I had pretty good legs when I was 28 (okay, maybe I shouldn’t have shown them off quite so brashly at Royal Ascot that year), but there it was staring back at me: overwhelming evidence of a well-lived and well-loved life. It wasn’t always pretty, perhaps. But it’s been pretty beautiful.

I made another interesting discovery while combing through my mother’s cramped storage closets. I found an oil painting of a pretty young girl in profile. She had big blue eyes, long lashes, a nice nose, and bright blonde hair. I had to smile. Because, although it’s been 34 years since that picture was commissioned, I suddenly remembered that it was painted from a photograph.

Sandra Ballentine is a writer living in New York City. She last wrote about superfacialists for the February issue of Vogue_._