With over 4.6 million daily active Snapchatters in Canada, Snapchat is one of the most popular social media apps. And the Beautiful Filter is the most widely used filter as it adds a blueish tint over the picture, thins the face, lightens skin and adds lip colour. This distorts our self-image and our perception of beauty.

Dove believes Canadians don’t need a filter to capture real beauty. Knowing that our audience lives on their phones, and that Friday nights is the most popular night to snap filtered selfies, we took over Snapchats Beautiful Filter so it didn’t change a thing.

We approached Snapchat with our idea to “hack” their Beautiful Filter with our Real Beauty message. Instead of adding a blueish tint, thinning the face, lightening the skin and adding lip colour, our filter didn’t change a thing. By raising your eyebrows, the filter would simply add a message to let your real beauty shine – a message all Canadians could get behind.

In just 24 hours, our Snapchat filter had over 4 million plays and over 1.3 million story views. Best of all, we reached millions of Canadians with our Real Beauty message, and helped them realize that they’re beautiful. No filter needed.