2020/2021 Winners & Shortlists

Cultural / Context information for the jury

Across the Arab world lies a deeply ingrained and humiliating belief that a woman must keep her virginity intact until her wedding night, at which time she must demonstrate her virginity either via a degrading medical test, but most often via a bloodstain on the matrimonial bedsheets. Thus she can establish her purity to her newly wed husband and his family. If a bride does not bleed on her wedding night, she brings dishonor to herself and her family, and this will lead to what many perceive as justified retribution in the form of rape, abuse, suicide and even honor killings. Regardless of her innate value as a human being or her accomplishments, a woman’s worth is tied to her hymen. Our Virginity Testing Kit was designed to break the silence surrounding this taboo custom, and ultimately bring an end to this dangerous and derogatory practice.

Tell the jury about the art direction.

We created a completely new visual language for it, playing around the concept of "defloration". Supers: Meaning plucking of flowers and also taking of a woman's "virginity". To do this, we used endemic flowers from the countries where virginity tests are most common: Supers: Rose, national flower of Morocco Syrian Wildflower, Syria Arabian Jasmine, Tunisia Desert Rose, Oman Royal Jasmine, Saudi Arabia Egyptian acacia, Egypt This visual language was then turned into posters, social content, a 36-pages hardcover book, and applied on the bedsheets and the kit packaging itself (white bedsheets, packaged and sold online as traditional virginity tests. We launched the campaign on Valentine’s Day with a social film).