Dove

Dove is a personal-care brand owned by the British consumer-goods company Unilever. It began in the United States in 1957 with a single product, the Dove Beauty Bar, and has since grown into a multi-category range covering body wash, skincare, deodorants, haircare and men's grooming, sold in more than 150 countries. The brand remains active and is one of Unilever's largest, with current campaigns running through 2024 and 2025.

Beyond its products, Dove is widely associated with its Campaign for Real Beauty, launched in 2004, which set out to question narrow ideas of how women should look. That advertising work, rather than any single formulation, is what most accounts treat as the brand's defining contribution.

The Dove Beauty Bar was developed by Lever Brothers in the 1950s for the American market. American chemist Vincent Lamberti was granted the original patents related to its manufacture during that decade while working for the company [2]. The product was built around a patented blend of mild cleansers and what the brand calls a quarter moisturizing cream, intended to clean the skin without the drying effect of ordinary soap. It launched in the United States in 1957 [4].

Dove established itself steadily in the American market through the following decades. It was relaunched in 1979 with a campaign positioning it in medical terms, and by 1986 it had become the best-selling soap brand in the United States [2]. Its first move into Europe came in 1989, beginning with Italy. By 2001 the brand was generating more than a billion dollars a year worldwide and ranked among Unilever's largest.

The 2000s shifted the brand's public identity toward advertising and social messaging. The Self-Esteem Project followed the Real Beauty campaign in 2006, and the same year the short film Evolution — which compressed a model's transformation through styling and digital retouching into a few seconds — won two Cannes Lions Grand Prix awards [3]. A second widely circulated film, Real Beauty Sketches, was released in 2013. The product line continued to broaden, with the men's range Dove Men+Care arriving in January 2010 and a Baby Dove line extending the brand to infant care.

Dove is owned by Unilever, which inherited the brand through its corporate history with Lever Brothers, the original developer [2]. Within Unilever's personal-care portfolio it sits alongside brands including Vaseline, Rexona, Lux, TRESemmé and Brut, as well as the skincare houses Dermalogica and Murad.

Dove's positioning centres on the idea of "Real Beauty": the company frames its mission as challenging unrealistic beauty standards and helping women and girls feel confident about their appearance. The Campaign for Real Beauty was launched in September 2004 [2], and Dove describes it as a pledge to break down narrow ideas of beauty. The brand's stated origin for the campaign was research finding that very few women considered themselves beautiful; the precise figure differs between sources. The originating study cited by the brand, The Real Truth About Beauty: A Global Report (Etcoff and colleagues, 2004), is reported as finding that only 2% of women considered themselves beautiful [4], while Wikipedia's account of the campaign gives the figure as 4% [3].

In 2024 the brand extended this positioning to artificial intelligence. Marking twenty years of Real Beauty, Dove announced what it described as the first beauty-brand commitment never to use AI in place of real people in its advertising, alongside a "Keep Beauty Real" stance [5]. Its chief marketing officer framed the move as seeking "a future in which women get to decide and declare what real beauty looks like – not algorithms". The brand's tagline is given as "Let's Change Beauty".

The Dove Beauty Bar remains the brand's original and signature product, defined by its moisturizing-cream content. The wider range now spans body washes, lotions, hair care and facial skincare, extended over time through the Dove Men+Care and Baby Dove lines. Distribution is multi-channel and global, with products offered for women, men, babies, adolescents and children across more than 150 markets.

The Campaign for Real Beauty has drawn substantial industry attention. Ad Age ranked it first in a list of the "Top Ad Campaigns of the 21st Century" [3]. In 2023, Kantar's Brand Inclusion Index placed Dove among the most inclusive brands for British consumers.

The Real Beauty campaign has also attracted criticism, some of it directed at Unilever's wider business. Commentators have called the campaign hypocritical given the highly sexualized portrayal of women in advertising for Axe, another Unilever brand, and given Unilever's production of the skin-lightening product Glow & Lovely [3].

In October 2017, a three-second Facebook advertisement showing a Black woman removing her shirt to reveal a white woman was condemned as racist. Unilever withdrew it and apologized, stating it should "never have happened" [2]. Separately, from 2023 the environmental group Greenpeace ran a "Real beauty, real harm" campaign criticizing Dove and Unilever over plastic-waste impacts in India, Indonesia and the Philippines [2].

Dove is an active global brand. It is sold in more than 150 countries. Its most recent high-profile activity includes the 2024 twenty-year Real Beauty milestone and the accompanying AI pledge, with the brand homepage continuing to reference "20 years of Real Beauty" and the #keepbeautyreal hashtag.