Dove created this racist ad and now it's sorry

Dove’s latest advertisement lit up the internet over the weekend — and not in a good way.

Last week, Dove posted a series of four photos to its Facebook page that depicted a black woman standing next to some Dove body wash and pulling off her brown shirt to reveal a white woman wearing a paler shirt. The photos were part of a seconds-long gif, which concluded in the white woman pulling off her shirt to reveal a third woman.

Predictably, this did not go over well.

Dove pulled the ad Saturday.

“Dove is committed to representing the beauty of diversity,” the company said in a Facebook statement. (Dove celebrates a “Real Beauty Pledge” on its website, which it says champion the idea that “beauty is for everyone,” and has long aired ads that include women who aren’t models.) “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.”

Naturally, this led people to wonder: What mark, exactly, was the company trying to hit?

This isn’t the first time this year that a beauty brand has caused a controversy online over a racist ad. In April, the skin care brand Nivea used the slogan “White is Purity” to promote deodorant, leading people to decry the ad as racist and white supremacists to reportedly celebrate the ad.