A cleansing bar for the American bathtub.

Dove began as a single product: the Dove Beauty Bar. English Wikipedia’s article on the brand says it was developed by Lever Brothers in the 1950s for the American market and launched in the United States in 1957, reaching Canada not long afterwards. The brand is owned today by Unilever, the group to which Lever Brothers belonged.

The bar was designed around a domestic problem. In the 1950s, Wikipedia explains, most Americans still bathed sitting in a tub rather than standing in a shower, and ordinary soap left a ring of scum around the bath that had to be scrubbed away. Lever Brothers set out to make a cleansing bar that would not leave that ring, and did so by formulating it from synthetic detergents rather than from traditional soap. The chemist credited with the work is Vincent Lamberti, who, according to Wikipedia, was granted the original patents connected with making Dove in the 1950s while he worked for Lever Brothers. The Yale Alumni Magazine, in its obituary of him, places him in the company’s research division in Edgewater, New Jersey.

That technical difference shaped the language around the product from the start. Dove was sold not as a soap but as a “beauty bar,” and the brand still uses that term today. The bar’s main ingredient, Wikipedia notes, belongs to a family of mild surfactants called isethionates, and the company changed the precise ingredient over the following decades.

Growth outside North America came late. Wikipedia records that Unilever test-marketed Dove in Europe in the mid-1960s but did not launch it there at the time. The European launch followed in 1989, starting with Italy. During the 1990s Unilever extended the name beyond the bar, first to other skin-cleansing products such as body wash and then to a wide personal-care range that now takes in deodorants, lotions, hair care and face care.

From a single bar to a personal-care range.

The widening of the range turned Dove from a bar of soap into what Unilever treats as a family of products under one name. Wikipedia lists antiperspirants and deodorants, body washes, beauty bars, lotions and moisturisers, hair care and face care among them, sold for women, men, babies, teenagers and children. In January 2010 Unilever added a men’s line, Dove Men+Care, which carries the Dove name into men’s grooming.

The decisive change in how the brand presented itself came in 2004. English Wikipedia’s article on the Campaign for Real Beauty says Unilever launched it that year, working with the advertising agency Ogilvy and the public-relations firm Edelman, and that the creative work was conceived by Ogilvy’s offices in Düsseldorf and London. The campaign grew out of a 2004 photography exhibition organised by Dove and Ogilvy, “Beyond Compare: Women Photographers on Real Beauty.”

Its first stage was a series of billboards, put up initially in Germany and the United Kingdom. In place of professional models they showed photographs of ordinary women taken by the portrait photographer Rankin, and invited passers-by to vote on captions such as “Wrinkled or Wonderful,” with the running result shown on the billboard itself. Television followed. Wikipedia describes a 2006 film called “Daughters,” in which mothers and daughters talked about beauty, and the short film “Evolution,” proposed by the Ogilvy art director Tim Piper, which showed the make-up, lighting and retouching behind an ordinary billboard image. Ogilvy then produced “Onslaught.” In 2006 the brand also set up the Dove Self-Esteem Project.

The campaign has continued under the same name. In April 2013 Dove released “Real Beauty Sketches,” a film created by Hugo Veiga in which a forensic sketch artist who could not see his subjects drew women first from their own descriptions and then from descriptions given by strangers they had met the day before. In October 2013 Dove launched Free Being Me with the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts.

In October 2017, as The Guardian and The New York Times reported, Dove withdrew a three-second video for body lotion posted on its US Facebook page after criticism, and apologised.

Design and documentation.

Soap, body-wash and deodorant brands are bought often, used daily and chosen in seconds, so their identities rely on signals a shopper can read from across an aisle. A bar of soap can carry its brand in its shape, its colour and the lettering pressed into its surface, as well as on the wrapper or carton around it. Liquids and deodorants move the same work onto bottles, tubes and sticks, where a fixed name panel usually sits above a changing band of colour or a picture that marks each variant.

Scent names do much of the sorting. Fragrances are often given evocative names drawn from places, weather, fruit or flowers rather than chemical descriptions, and a single brand may run many of them side by side, each with its own tint. Ranges also split by user, with separate lines for men, women and children.

Many of the names in this group are long-lived and have changed hands between large companies. Each guide sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how it presents itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A bird, a white bar and real faces.

Dove’s visual identity starts with its name. The brand pairs the name with the silhouette of the bird. The product itself has been part of the identity from the beginning: a bar sold as a beauty bar rather than a soap, a distinction that rests on the synthetic-detergent formula Lever Brothers developed in the 1950s.

The more distinctive design decision of the last two decades is photographic rather than graphic. From the first Real Beauty billboards in 2004, Dove’s advertising has been built around pictures of women who are not professional models, shot plainly, with the viewer invited to look again at what counts as beautiful. Rankin’s portraits for the first billboards, the before-and-after structure of “Evolution” and the paired drawings of “Real Beauty Sketches” all use the same device: show the image, then show how it was made or how else it could be seen. On its own website the brand describes a “No Digital Distortion” mark, which Dove says it uses on imagery that has not been digitally altered.

The packaging has occasionally carried the same idea. Wikipedia records that in 2017 Dove and Ogilvy London produced limited-edition body-wash bottles shaped to suggest different body types, carrying the argument of the advertising onto the pack itself.

The men’s line shows how far one name can stretch. Dove Men+Care, launched in January 2010, keeps the Dove name for a range aimed at men, so that a single brand covers products for women, men, babies and children without splitting into separate brands.

For a design guide, Dove shows how a household product can build its identity on a point of view as much as on a logo, with photography, casting and copy doing work that colour and type do for other brands. Compare it with Axe, its stablemate at Unilever, whose advertising took the opposite tone, and Ivory, Procter & Gamble’s American bar soap. For this guide we use wrapper navy and soft gold on bar white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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