What comes to mind when you hear “body confidence”? The answer is obviously “soap”, right? Not exactly? You probably think I’m slightly mad (pun intended) for even suggesting it. 

Well, our friends over at Dove believe one of the best ways to end body shaming is to create and market their soap with different bottle shapes and sizes to celebrate our different shapes and sizes.  They think they are drawing a bold fat line to their assertion that “Beauty comes in all shapes and sizes.” But we think their execution draws a very thin dotted line, especially when you find out that these bottles aren’t even available for sale.  #WTF?!

Let me explain: In a recent press release, Dove announced: “Every woman’s version of beauty is different and, if you ask us, these differences are there to be celebrated.”  Furthering their more well-known campaign “Real Beauty”, which capitalizes on using real women in their campaigns to represent real beauty and diversity and with which they have had huge success.  In this latest iteration, Dove says “we wanted to bring this to life through our products, too. That’s why we’ve created a limited edition range of Dove Body Washes, designed as a reminder that beauty is diverse and diversity is beautiful.”

Marketing their original brand of soap in bottles that come in a variety of shapes and sizes seems like an interesting idea.  The shelf will look nice, with the little squatty ones, and the tall wiggly ones, sort of like Cinderella's stepsisters in the HBA aisle.  But, er…. Upon further reading we find this nugget: “We’ve been gifting these bottles … as a ‘thank you’ (the range is not available to purchase).”   Hmmm…  the plot thickens.

Dove tends to have very successful campaigns, especially in the last 13 years or so. This new bottle campaign, according to Dove, is a new way to shed light on body shaming and showing we’re all imperfectly imperfect… or something like that. The sentiment is there, but the delivery was a pretty big miss in our humble opinion, to the consumer who will likely never see one of these squatty bottles.

AND even though we agree that media places ridiculous pressure on women, we don’t believe that Dove’s weird and wacky (and invisible) bottles are any news, really. Let’s celebrate the uniqueness that is the human body, and for sure celebrate all of the diversity in size and shape in real tangible ways.

But even if we could get our hands on one of them, I mean, it’s not like we’re expected to wear the bottle… are we?