I came across a dove experiment on you tube. The sole purpose for this experiment was to investigate self- image perception.
During the experiment different women were asked to describe themselves to an FBI trained forensic artist. The artist then drew the portraits of the different women participating, based on how they described themselves.
The women described themselves in the worst possible way, one woman described her chin as protruding and stated how her mum had told her that she has a big jaw. The other woman thought that she had a chubby round face. One woman thought she had terrible freckles and another thought she had a big forehead.
The catch was that these same women were made to interact with strangers. The strangers then also submitted a description of the same women to the FBI artist. He drew two portraits for each of the women, one based on their own description and another on the stranger’s perception.
What was fascinating to discover was that, the portraits created from the stranger’s description were beautiful and focussed on beautiful features that the women were not even aware of.
The portraits which had been drawn from the women’s own description of themselves appeared very unappealing.
Comparing the two portraits was interesting. The women experienced strong emotions when they saw the two portraits hung side by side. In that moment they realised that they had a distorted self-perception that had affected parts of their lives in significant ways. They were discovering that they are actually more beautiful than they thought!
The problem was that they were bombarded by unattainable standards of beauty seen on social media, tv, magazines etc. How they perceived themselves was far less positive than how it should have been. Regardless, the strangers could still see and appreciate their beauty.
You too are beautiful, no-matter how you see yourself and no-matter what they have said about your appearance.
Positively Swayed 