Powerful Greenpeace Film Subverts Iconic Dove Ad on Anniversary of ‘Real Beauty’ Campaign

A powerful new film released today by Greenpeace UK has taken aim at beauty brand Dove. The film offers a devastating rebuke to the hypocrisy of the mega-brand and the harmful impacts of the plastic pollution pumped out by the soap-maker and its parent company Unilever. 

Directed by BAFTA-nominated filmmaker Alice Russell (If The Streets Were On Fire), the hard-hitting film is a subversion of the acclaimed 2022 Ogilvy-produced Dove video 'Toxic Influence'. Mirroring the original, it features pairs of mothers and daughters in conversation. The pairs begin by discussing their positive reactions to Dove’s marketing, before the true scale of the brand's plastic waste and its devastating impacts are revealed - bringing with it strong feelings of shock and revulsion. Russell was joined by Anna Wells as producer (Wasteminster) and Sarah Cunningham as director of photography. 

It comes a week after Greenpeace activists shut down the entrances to Unilever’s HQ in Central London on Thursday 5 September, locking themselves onto barricades made to look like giant Dove products. Climbers unfurled a giant banner across the building’s facade bearing the message ‘Real Beauty isn’t this toxic’ and calling on Dove to ditch plastic.

The release coincides with the 20th Anniversary of Dove’s Iconic 'Real Beauty' campaign, which launched in September 2004. The campaign has positioned the brand as one with a social and environmental ‘purpose’. But Dove, and its parent company Unilever, remain one of the largest plastic polluters globally. 

A Greenpeace International report released late last year showed that Dove’s parent company Unilever sells the equivalent of 1,700 super-polluting plastic sachets per second. An estimated 6.4 billion sachets were produced by Dove alone in 2022, making up over 10% of Unilever’s total sachets sales. A field investigation by Greenpeace South East Asia and Greenpeace UK revealed shocking images of Dove’s sachet waste polluting beaches and waterways in the Philippines and Indonesia. 

Plastic sachets are particularly harmful to the environment, with a senior figure at Unilever describing the packaging as “evil because you cannot recycle it”. They are known to exacerbate devastating flooding when they enter the environment and jam local waste systems and waterways.

Greenpeace is calling on Dove and Unilever to phase-out single-use plastic from its operations and transition to reuse in the next 10 years, starting with the worst offenders: plastic sachets. Greenpeace is also calling on the company to advocate for this same level of ambition at the next round of negotiations on a UN Global Plastics Treaty when it attends as co-chair of the Business Coalition in November.

Anna Diski, campaigner at Greenpeace UK said: “This powerful film shows the genuine human reaction to the hypocrisy which seeps through Dove and its slick marketing. It’s a reaction which should worry the brand - the women and girls they claim to champion won’t put up with it and want Dove to change. They know there’s no Real Beauty in the real harm caused by Dove’s plastic pollution. They can’t keep flooding the world with unimaginable amounts of harmful plastic. That’s why Dove must stop selling plastic sachets now and commit to phasing out single-use plastic within a decade.”