Finding True Beauty in the Super Bowl

In honor of last night's big game, I decided to use the Super Bowl as my prompt for this week’s post. 

I will never forget seeing the first “True Beauty” campaign commercial that Dove released during the 2006 Super Bowl.  My emotions were stirred immediately by its opening notes of Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors” (who doesn’t get misty-eyed hearing that song?), the powerful montage of young girls with captions like “thinks she’s ugly” or “afraid she’s fat”, and the call to action mid-commercial that challenged us to “change their minds”.  The images were powerful and quite unexpected, especially during the broadcast of a major sporting event, and I was a mess.  Not quite Steel Magnolias mess, but the tears were more than just welling up in my eyes and it wasn’t until I looked over at my husband, who, God love his heart, hadn’t been married to me for an entire year at the time, and saw the mixed look of confusion, concern, and what was probably the internal urge to flee, that I realized how mentally imbalanced I must have appeared.  During the process of wiping my face and intermittent attempts to take deep breaths, I explained that so many women (read: me) are still like those little girls questioning their beauty, purpose, and, worst of all, their worth.  He, in turn, shared his shock over seeing someone cry as a result of a commercial and during the Super Bowl, no less.  “There’s no crying during the Super Bowl unless your team loses” he said.  It was not the first time I would prove to be an enigma to him and it most certainly wasn’t the last.

Five years and a change of decades haven’t erased the images in that commercial, although I have gotten away from buying every product that Dove has on the market just to support the self esteem of teenage girls world wide.  I am a sucker for a good ad campaign.  If anything, they deepened my concern for our seeming inability to find true beauty within ourselves.

Too often, I find myself using women who appear to have it all together as a frame of reference which usually leaves me feeling less than satisfied with myself next to their seeming perfection.  Maybe we would all feel better if we would just get our insecurities out in the open.  We could wear signs around our neck that would tell how we really feel about ourselves.  Anything from “I am not the mother I want to be” to “my hair is flat today” would reveal self-perceived imperfections and allow for compassion without competitiveness.  Would it give us more reason to feel self-righteous if someone else’s list was longer, more complicated, or troubled?  Would we respond with words of encouragement like “you do a fantastic job with your children” and “I think your hair looks great”?  Or, sadly, would those same things leave us vulnerable prey for cattiness. 

It all comes back to the eternal struggle to be thankful for the body I have right now, to be the best “me” I can be, and to search for new and different standards of beauty.  It isn’t until we can stop wishing for what could be and started looking forward to what is yet to come, that we will find freedom, the ability to pursue the true purpose in our lives, and a lifetime to discover the strengths, talents, and unique qualities that make us beautiful both inside and out.  Like the last caption in the Dove commercial says: “because every girl deserves to feel good about herself and to see how beautiful she really is”.   Whether that is a statement that needs to be made in a commercial during the Super Bowl is an entirely different conversation.

 See the "True Colors" True Beauty Campaign Commercial from Dove below and make sure your tissues are handy.