DOVE
CAMERA SHY
Dove wanted to continue its mission to challenge the way women see themselves, starting with a simple but incredibly relatable insight: women don’t like having their picture taken.
Research found that 77% of women were camera shy, whether that meant turning away from the lens, hiding behind a hand or asking for a photo to be deleted. But women weren’t always like this. We wanted to explore when that confidence changes, and what it says about the relationship women develop with their own appearance as they grow up.
We created Camera Shy, contrasting adult women instinctively avoiding the camera with young girls who couldn’t get enough of it. Built around the question, “When did you stop thinking you’re beautiful?”, the film took a small, everyday female behaviour and turned it into a much bigger conversation about beauty and self-confidence. It connected around the world, reaching around 100 million online views, becoming one of the world’s most-shared ads and winning Gold at Cannes Lions, LIA, Epica and Eurobest.
For Dove, it showed the power of speaking to women through something they instantly recognise in themselves. Rather than telling women how they should feel about beauty, we reflected a real behaviour back at them and gave Dove a meaningful role in questioning why it exists in the first place.