Dove is in hot water thanks to a questionable label on one of its lotions.
On Tuesday, a woman posted a Twitter photo of Dove's Summer Glow Nourishing Lotion, that featured the classification "Normal to dark skin," implying that light skin tones are "normal" and dark skin isn't. Ugh.
Twitter user @hatfulofalex rightfully tweeted her outrage, saying "Dear @Dove , What skin colour is 'normal' ?!?" Her tweet has since garnered more than 15,000 retweets and more than 12,000 favourites.
It's an unfortunate (and racist) choice of words for the beauty company whose marketing campaign focuses on "real beauty."
"Dove is committed to representing beauty of all ages, ethnicities, shapes and sizes. We believe in celebrating real beauty and in raising the self-esteem of women and young girls globally. Our European team was already aware of the mistake regarding labeling on Dove Summer Glow Body Lotion bottles. This was corrected during the summer of 2012. Many of our lotions focus on moisture as the key benefit and in some cases we label them ‘normal to dry skin.’
The Dove Summer Glow Body Lotion is a gradual self tanner that also moisturizes. It should have been marked as “fair to medium skin” or “medium to dark skin” depending on the skin type it focuses on. In this case, there was an oversight from our team and we accidentally combined the phrases. As soon as our teams in Europe discovered this error, they began the process of relabeling the bottles. We corrected the language in our other communication vehicles where possible. As always, we appreciate the feedback and support from our community."
But it seems as if the original offensive packaging, which resulted in a Twitter firestorm two years ago, is still being sold.
A quick search reveals that Summer Glow "normal skin" products are still in circulation and sold on sites such as Coles Australia, Amazon.uk, Amazon.com and Dove Australia.
Naturally, the Twitterverse isn't pleased.