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Dove faces Twitter backlash over its ‘racist’ advert


Beauty products manufacturer Dove has taken down one of its advertisement accused of being racist.

The ad features a black woman taking off her shirt and transitioning to a different white woman.

The advert went viral on social media and evoked angry reactions from netizens.

Dove have apologized for the ad, writing on Twitter; “Dove is committed to representing the beauty of diversity. In an image we posted this week, we missed the mark in thoughtfully representing women of color and we deeply regret the offense that it has caused.”

According to the New York Times, Marissa Solan, a spokeswoman for Dove, said on Sunday that the Ad “was intended to convey that Dove Body Wash is for every woman and be a celebration of diversity, but we got it wrong and, as a result, offended many people.”

She added that Dove had withdrawn the ad and was “re-evaluating our internal processes for creating and reviewing content.”

She declined to say how many people reviewed the ad or whether any of them were African-American.

The ad, a three-second GIF, featured three women, each removing her shirt to reveal the next.

But the transition from the black woman to the white women — compiled into a static collage by a social media user — evoked a long-running racist trope in soap advertising: a “dirty” black person cleansed into whiteness.