Is beauty really in the eye of the beholder? If we’re to judge by Dove’s new Real Beauty Sketches campaign, it certainly is.

And what most women are beholding isn’t exactly beautiful.

Some companies, like Pepsi, Dodge, Allstate, or AT&T are constantly advertising to stay at the top of their respective games . Other companies are a little more strategic with campaigning, choosing when and how to jump into the commercials landscape with the right marketing scheme. Dove is one of the latter companies, and it has chosen to roll with a campaign aimed at women and beauty.

This doesn’t seem like much of an outside-the-box idea. However, the brand new Dove Soap advertisement focuses on a former police officer skilled in the art of creating forensic sketches. A young woman sits away from the sketcher, facing a window and separated by a curtain. Later, other women sit facing the window, describing their vision of themselves as well as the other women. Two different sketches emerge for each woman, and the differences are quite striking.

The goal of the exercise? To see how the woman’s description of herself matches up to a stranger’s description. As you can see, the results are quite striking and quite impactful on the women, several of which choke up after seeing their vision compared to the vision of the complete stranger.

Courtesy of Dove

f course, ultimately the company is hoping women will see the sketch, correlate the Dove brand with an honest take on beauty and how that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If people think of Dove as an honest and good-natured company, people will be more likely to pick up a Dove product. Still, it’s a compelling and insightful advertisement, and certainly proves that sometimes the poignant angle can be better than the comedic one.

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Dove Real Beauty Sketches