This is the advertising campaign of a beauty soap that has been behind a move to change women's image of what is beautiful from standard media images to more realistic ones of faces that millions of ordinary females have.

The 3-minute commercial, made by Ogilvy and released last week, has more than 15 million hits on YouTube so far.

Dove, even in previous ad campaigns, had been pushing to change women's image of themselves since they are their own worst beauty critic with only 4 per cent of women around the world who consider themselves beautiful.

The soap-maker said the ad is a social experiment to find out how women view their beauty versus what others, in this case a forensic artist who only talked to the females and did not view them, see.

Just days after the roll-out of the ad, a parody produced by newfeelingstime.com, featuring men was released on YouTube, and it has also gone viral with so far more than 1.3 million views.

However, its conclusion was different with men finding out that other people did not think they look beautiful and the two sketches showing the forensic artist's version based on the self description had the portrait subjects looking better.

Reactions to the parody ranged from amusement to disgust.

One of those who didn't like the parody is Shasta Lusk, who commented in a Mashable article on the ad campaign parody that it is the worst Dove ad.

"Com one..you hurt people to get a point across? It's not funny nor a smart advertising decision. You soap has too much chemical and perfume and your promotions are too much as well. There are so many other ways to make people feel better about themselves, a more positive approach would be ideal. So disgusted," he wrote.

However, Miguel Ignacio had to remind Shasta that it was a parody. "Unfortunately jokes can be really offensive sometimes, but I thought this one was funny (and clearly ridiculous) enough to compensate," he pointed out.

Daniel Cattolica agreed the ad may appear funny, but emphasised, "It's also very insensitive to assume that men don't have the same struggles with self-image that women do. There's no reason why the commercial for women couldn't have struck a chord in men as well, so let's start talking about the way human beings in general perceive themselves, instead of making shortsighted stereotypes and distinctions between men and women."

However, the majority of the comments in Mashable were one-liners who found the parody hilarious.

But even the original ad was not spared of criticisms, one of them being the sketch that the women perceive to be their more beautiful representation had them all look thinner and younger looking.

"If that is the crux of beauty, then I guess we're all pretty screwed by that obnoxiously inexorable bastard called time," blogger Kate Fridkis wrote in Huffington Post.

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