Over the course of the week, an outlandish image of what it looks like a shampoo advertisement targeting muslim women started circulating over social media.
The image showed an asian woman supposedly washing her hair, but this time, without removing her veil, thus not letting the shampoo do it’s intended job of cleaning the hair.
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Tracing the image
Many of social media accounts has shared the same image, either by re-uploading it, or by retweeting it and sharing it.
From those pages, in arabic, a famous satirical facebook page “Dr. Abu El-Baraa”, with a simple caption that reads “A shampoo advertisement in Malaysia”.
And upon searching from the facebook platform, a personal account from egypt by the name of “Wael El-Mulla” has gained over 150 shares for the same image and caption.
On the other hand, the image with the arabic caption wasn’t famous yet, at the time of writing this text, but the english caption showed a account by the handle “
@dxnlls” reading “Do you still have to wear it when you’re showering?” and gained over 4000 retweets and 1700 likes so far.
https://twitter.com/dxnlls/status/858611320282677248
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Why Malaysia?
While it was a bit difficult to identify the first person who published this image, a closer look at it reveals two clues, the first one is the text written at the bottom of the image “agar kulit kepala dari rambut kekal sihar”.
By just adding this phrase into Google Translator text box, the website itself identifies the language and suggest that it is from Malay, the official language of Malaysia.
As for the logo, by cropping it out from the original image and implementing a reverse image search on it, nothing came out of it, so it was a dead end.
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Looking for the actual source
Going back to Malay, and with the help of Google translator once again, I got the translation of “veiled woman” which turned out to be “wanita bertudung”.
By using the Malay language, it should be more easy to look for any original source of the image, which could be a real advertisement, or maybe some kind of tv shows, or probably a photoshoped prank that went viral.
By applying the malay words into “wanita bertudung” into Tweetdeck, a lot of mixed search result came up, part of those tweets were retweets of the image being questions, others were plain malay tweets that combined actual tweets and other spam advertisements.
So another word should have been used to describe what I actually need to find.
Translating the word “Shampoo” into “syampoo” and using it again on tweetdeck, a flood of tweets showed up, with most users adding a laughing crying emoticon.
https://twitter.com/imranfahmi96/status/859002206405574656
Upon inspecting some of those tweets, it turned out that this image was taken from a youtube video of a user named “Mr The All Shared” with its avatar similar to the logo questioned above.
And by examining the clip, which turned out to be an advertisement but from a humorous point of view, the image that started all this search was taken as a screenshot at 0:43, and shows the same elements and details as the original image.
According to the information mentioned in the “About” section, “Mr The All Shared” is a production company, and the caption under the video cleared out that the video that shows the veiled woman taking a shower was an advertisement for a client called “Escarves”, a company selling veils in Malaysia.
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A copy of this post has been published on Medium.
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