Evolution, also called The Evolution Of Beauty, is an advertising campaign launched by Unilever in 2006 as part of its Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, to promote the newly created Dove Self-Esteem Fund.
The film opens with a “pretty, but ordinary girl” (Canadian cartoonist and television producer Stephanie Betts, whom joint director Tim Piper later married) entering and sitting down in a studio.Two harsh lights are then switched on and the first bars of The Flashbulb’s “Passage D,” a breakcore-piece with piano accompaniment, are heard. The short credits sequence provides the title of the film and credit to Dove. The camera then switches to a time-lapse sequence, showing makeup and hair artist Diana Carreiro making Betts up and adjusting her hair, transforming her into a “strikingly beautiful billboard model.” When the final physical adjustments of Betts’s appearance have been made, the team members all move off-camera, and a series of camera flashes begins as the photographer takes shots of Betts in various poses.
One shot is selected from the batch and moved into a generic image editing software interface, where a series of “Photoshopping” adjustments are made to alter Betts’s appearance even further, including, but not limited to: lengthening her neck, adjusting the curve of her shoulders, altering her hair and skin, and enlarging her eyes and mouth. The final image of Betts, now rendered almost unrecognizable, is then transferred to a billboard advertisement for the fictional “Easel” (or “Fasel”) brand of foundation makeup, and the video fades to the statement, “No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted.” (Text from Wikipedia)
