The Marquette Student Government Speakers Commission hosted model Stacy Nadeau Monday night to speak about her experiences with the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty.
Nadeau was only a sophomore at DePaul University in 2004 when she was first approached for the chance to become a "Dove girl." While working at a spa in Chicago, a woman asked her if she could post an announcement on the window about an audition with a talent agency. The woman then told Nadeau she should audition herself.
Nadeau's friend Kate, pretending to be Nadeau, had actually called to set up an audition. At first, Nadeau said she was upset. But Nadeau's mother advised her to go because she had a "funny feeling" about it.
Three months after her audition, the talent agency and a Dove executive called to let Nadeau know she was going to be one of the "Dove girls" at a photo shoot in New York. By summer 2005, her first media placement occurred. She said the models were trained to deal with the media and read up on research Dove had produced.
"I had become a part of a campaign by Dove to create an ad that had women straight off the street to represent real and natural," Nadeau said.
She said the point of the campaign is not only to portray "real beauty," but also to show that the models in the ads have to deal with the scrutiny of not living up the image of other models. In a survey done by Dove, only 2 percent of women globally were comfortable with calling themselves beautiful, she said.
"We have to redefine beauty," Nadeau said. "The models that we see in magazines and other ads are fake. No one of us has the time to spend five hours blow-drying our hair to make it look like that in an ad."
In her presentation, Nadeau played a video clip that showed how much make-up and effort goes into getting a model ready for a photo shoot, and the amount of air brushing that takes place afterward.
The differences between before and after were striking: 100 out of 100 people in a survey thought the actual model, standing underneath a Los Angeles billboard with her on it, was a different person than the one in the ad, Nadeau said.
Lauren Grimshaw, a freshman in the College of Communication, said Nadeau was informative and eye-opening. She said she knew that airbrushing took place, but not to the extent that was seen in the video.
Sara Campbell, a sophomore in the College of Arts & Sciences, said Nadeau shed new light on the meaning of "real beauty" through her experiences with the Campaign for Real Beauty.