Too many girls develop low self-esteem from hang-ups about their looks and, consequently, fail to reach their full potential in later life.

Statistics show that when girls feel bad about their looks, nearly half of them (47 percent)* disconnect from life and avoid normal daily activities, such as attending school or even giving their opinions.

In North America, Dove believes having a strong female role model can play a role in shaping a girl’s self-esteem and helping her reach her full potential. Girls today can look up to any number of remarkable women: elected officials; business leaders; athletes. Yet second to Mom, 32% of girls cite celebrities as their top role models. Dove believes there’s an opportunity to identify other inspiring female role models.

To refresh the Real Beauty campaign, we decided to take action against photo retouching by turning a Photoshop tool into a new media channel. We did this by creating a Photoshop Action – a tool that photo manipulators already use – that communicates our message to those responsible.

A Photoshop Action is a tool that applies a series of effects with a single click - shared among the Photoshop community. Our target regularly downloads them online, and applies them to an image they are working on to achieve a certain look.

We created our “Beautify” action and shared it on sites where they already browse. It was posted by an anonymous account and claimed to create a “skin glow effect.” However, when applied it actually reverted their photo back to its original state and communicated our powerful message.

By using technology as the medium, a powerful conversation was sparked.

The action was downloaded by over 9,000 Photoshoppers. As a result, it got covered by news sources all over the globe, sparking meaningful conversations among Photoshoppers and women in Dove’s target. It gained over 47 million blog impressions, over 27 million Twitter impressions and over 7 million PR impressions – once again, putting Dove at the forefront of the fight against photo manipulation.