I’m sure most of you are familiar with Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign, in which the soap company used women with natural body types instead of heavily airbrushed stick-thin models. The ads were lauded across the mommy blogosphere for helping promote realistic images of women’s bodies instead of an unrealistic ideal. Now, according to a profile on digital retouching master Pascal Dangin in The New Yorker, it turns out that these “real” women may not have been so real after all:

[R]etouchers tend to practice semi-clandestinely. “It is known that everybody does it, but they protest,” Dangin said recently. “The people who complain about retouching are the first to say, ‘Get this thing off my arm.’ ” I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual “real women” in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”

Unilever, the company that owns the Dove brand, is denying doing anything above and beyond normal photo processing and color correction:

“The ‘real women’ ad referenced in recent media coverage was created and produced entirely by Ogilvy, the Dove brand’s advertising agency, from start to finish, and the women’s bodies were not digitally altered,” Unilever Senior Communications Marketing Manager Stacie Bright said in the statement, referring to the 2005 ad, which showed younger women in their underwear.

Ms. Bright and Mr. Dangin’s company, Box Studios, did not immediately respond to e-mail queries about precisely what the “color correction” entailed. But the [2007 Dove Pro-Age ads worked on by Dangin] were a later incarnation of the “Campaign for Real Beauty” than those apparently referenced in The New Yorker.

Whatever the truth is, it’s certain that Dove’s PR people are going to be working through the weekend.

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