Welcome to the Dove Self-Esteem Project

The Body Confident Sport program was a campaign collaboration between Dove and Nike to boost the body confidence of girls in the sporting industry. The inspiration behind this campaign was the shocking fact that 57% of teenage girls quit sport due to low body confidence. The programme ran in person and was aimed at 11-17 year old girls and was delivered by coaches in after-school clubs and PE sessions.

Dove took their Self-Esteem mission to the virtual world by creating a one of a kind Roblox game which was specially constructed to challenge unrealistic beauty ideals and to build self-esteem in young women. In today’s society over 1.3 billion women and girls play video games across the world. Gaming is a great tool for exploring and building communities, however, the representation of women characters conventionally are extremely unrealistic which has a negative impact on self-esteem. That’s why Dove decided to create this campaign to give a more realistic female representation to young girls to have a positive impact on their self-esteem.

Unrealistic and narrow beauty standards have made it difficult for young people to embrace their uniqueness. Everyone experiences the pressure of unrealistic beauty ideals, however, societal bias unfairly discriminates against Black girls and women based on their hair texture and hair styles which are culturally important. Dove decided to break the boundaries of unrealistic beauty ‘ideals’ to challenge stereotypes and build confidence to the next generation. They launched The CROWN UK Fund to invest £170,000 in Black-led grassroots organisations. Dove are also one of the first supporters of The Halo Code which is an alliance which was formed to create a more fair and inclusive experience for Black people through the advancement of social policy change.