Dove. Real Beauty. Real Harm.
A Greenpeace brand attack

Film and social campaign targeting Dove’s use of harmful single use plastic sachets.

The story

For 20 years Dove have styled themselves as a champion of women and girls, promoting body confidence with their groundbreaking Real Beauty campaigns. This campaign for Greenpeace exposed the toxic double standard behind the purpose washing. 

Every day, Dove floods the planet with millions of items of throwaway plastic. It is choking our oceans, killing wildlife, and fuelling unprecedented environmental disaster. The very women Dove claims to support are drowning in a sea of single-use plastic, their neighbourhoods dumping grounds for corporate waste. 

The Real Harm campaign subverted Dove’s Real Beauty platform to expose this hypocrisy. At the heart of the campaign was a film, Dove: Toxic Influence, turning Dove’s classic fem-powerment advertising style against them. 

Alongside the film, we created a wider campaign, with messaging, assets and activations for use by Greenpeace activists across the globe. We wrote an open letter to Dove calling on them to ditch plastic. We asked customers to join the campaign and pledge to ditch Dove. We turned the Dove logo into a dead bird. We juxtaposed Real beauty imagery with the horrifying impact of their pollution, highlighting the gap between what Dove says and what it does. Activists took the fight to Unilever HQ, locking on to a giant dead dove, and unveiling a massive ‘Real Harm’ banner. They took to socials to spread the word. And they took it to the highstreet, stickering Dove products on shop shelves. 

As a result of the campaign, 78,268 people pledged to ditch Dove and 126,202 people signed the open letter. The film generated more than 3.5m views across social channels.

Dove’s campaigns may tackle toxic beauty standards, but it took this campaign to force them to confront their toxic double standard. 

Partnered on: Campaign concept, film concept and script, campaign narrative and core copy, social and real life activation concepts.

Collaborated with: Ashley Johnson and the brand narrative team at Pentagram, Naresh Ramchandani, Robyn Cusworth, Lizzie Reid, Ailbhe Larkin, Kong Studio, Steve Qua.

As seen in: The Independent, The Standard, Creative Review, Creative Bloq, Campaign, AdWeek, Marketing Week, PR Week, Shots, The Grocer, The Ecolologist, The Branding Journal.

Awards: Webby for Video & Film, Sustainability & Environment 2025, Webby, People's Voice Video & Film Sustainability & Environment 2025, Purpose Awards EMEA 2025: Charity or NGO – Best Environmental Cause Campaign.

Key copy:

  • Dove are more than just a soap brand. For decades, their ‘Real Beauty’ campaign has sold a vision of empowerment that confronted toxic beauty trends. They’ve styled themselves as the champion of women and young girls.

    But behind the scenes, Dove has been fuelling a human and environmental crisis by pumping single use plastic out into the world.

    Dove claims to tackle toxic beauty standards, while creating toxic rivers.

  • Over 200 million of the world’s poorest people are at risk from more severe and frequent flooding caused by the waste of brands like Dove. That’s the population of the UK, France and Germany combined.

    Dove are fully aware of the alternatives to single-use plastic. Yet, every year, they pump out 6.4 billion of the worst offenders, sachets – small, single use plastic packaging – onto communities in the global south. That’s 12,000 more plastic sachets a minute, which nearly impossible to collect and even harder to recycle.

    Dove’s plastic waste is choking rivers and oceans, jamming local waste systems, polluting neighbourhoods and waterways, and when burned, leaching toxic chemicals into the air we breathe. Across India, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, it’s many of the same young girls and women who Dove claim to champion who are left to deal with waste’s harmful effects.

  • Dove has the power to solve the plastics crisis – they just choose not to.

    Dove’s parent company, Unilever, claims to want a ‘waste-free’ world, yet just 0.2% of its packaging is reusable. They’ll tell you they’re changing. They’ll tell you recycling’s the answer and that they’ve got big targets. But recycling alone is a dead end. We simply can’t recycle our way out of this crisis.

    Dove and Unilever are letting us down. They have to change. They owe it to the next generation of young girls and women they claim to champion.

  • We’re not here to shame Dove’s consumers. We’re here to challenge this much-loved brand to live up to its proclaimed values. We’re here to empower those who have been let down and those who have been directly impacted by Dove’s plastic waste. Dove say they care about ‘real beauty’? It’s time they prove it.

    Tell Dove to stop poisoning our planet with plastic.

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