At 96, grandma becomes a beauty model

Grandmother Irene Sinclair, 96, from north London.

At the age of 96, Irene Sinclair, a grandmother from north London, has joined Kate Moss (Rimmel), Beyonce Knowles (L'Oreal) and Scarlett Johansson (Calvin Klein) as the "face" of an international beauty campaign.

Sinclair has been pictured by the celebrity portrait photographer Rankin for a global poster-based promotion for the Dove toiletries brand.

The campaign, launched yesterday, is intended to challenge conventional notions of beauty.

It features a picture of Sinclair wearing a head-wrap and asks, "Will society ever accept old can be beautiful?" alongside tick-boxes marked "Wonderful" or "Wrinkled".

Sinclair's image has already appeared on a 20m-high poster in New York's Times Square, where the American version of the campaign was launched in September.

Daryl Fielding, of Ogilvy & Mather, the agency that drew up the campaign, said it was possible to combine altruistic values and sound business strategy in a single commercial.

"You can have both. You can have principles and good business results - there are a lot of examples of brands that have had their cake and eaten it," she said, citing Body Shop as an example.

Dove earned a reputation for using amateur models in an earlier campaign for a body-firming lotion - also photographed by Rankin and challenging conventional views of ideal shape.

Fielding said: "Other advertisers tend to feature pin-thin women who are 20 if they are a day. We know from research with consumers that they find those images ridiculous."

The Ogilvy approach has caused a stir in the advertising industry. Ignacio Oreamuno, of the advertising website ihaveanidea.org, said: "The Dove brand has always been honesty, but in this case it's speaking to something that not even consumers themselves dare talk about - real raw beauty. Advertising in the beauty market has always been about achieving impossible unattainable beauty. Consumers embraced that. Here, Dove is taking the beauty train on the opposite direction at full speed."

Sinclair, who has never modelled before but was chosen for the campaign after being spotted by a casting agency during a visit to a housing project for the elderly, said: "I got involved to be an ambassador for older people and to affirm that we have a lot to offer and we aren't past it. I've never been beautiful, but I feel I am beautiful now. It's all about growing older gracefully."

Dove said it launched the "Campaign for Real Beauty" because conventional thinking on good looks was "defined by narrow, stifling, stereotypes".

- INDEPENDENT