BBC3 Beauty Season

'Mum, didn't we do this stage mother horror doc last year?'

Sasha Teen Queen: Deja-ITV documentary

I posted about this story last summer, and this BBC Three documentary just goes over the same ground as last year's ITV show on Sasha. If anything, it seemed fuel Sasha's stage mother to drag her around more beauty queen pageants, but this time in Houston. It was meant to be a key highlight in the BBC Three Beauty Season, yet when watching it did not feel investigative (it didn't really reveal more than the ITV expose) it just felt like the same narrative but set in the US and all for the sake of aquiring a new audience. Bit tasteless.

BBC Three: Sleepy Beauty Season

I think for me, the season could have achieved so much more than these cut and paste magazine feature docs. How about taking beauty mags and advertisers on a roadshow to directly talk to young women in schools about what they think real beauty is? What stands out so far in this season, is that the BBC has not spoken to one important person in the beauty industry as it is today. Yes extensions are an interesting topic, so is airbrushing, but I feel they could have gone deeper and been more ground-breaking.

DOVE: Are They Really Forward Thinking?

Another issue I have with this season, is that the BBC cite the Dove campaign as a forward thinking beauty advertisers, as they use non-airbrushed real women as their models. But the BBC seems to have overlooked two massive media stories regarding this campaign and Dove:

a) the women were rumoured to have actually been airbrushed 
b) Greenpeace is campaigning against them for using Palm Oil in their products, which is causing deforestation

I can't help feeling that Dove's consumer campaign is a shoddy cash-in on we are on the side of real women, therefore I don't think the BBC should be using them at all as a good example.