Only 17% of women feel confident enough to leave the house without doing this. What about you?

Would you describe yourself as average or beautiful?

That was the confronting choice given to a group of women in Dove’s latest campaign.

Their powerful new film shows women having to choose between one of two doors: one labelled “average”, and the other, “beautiful”. It’s a moving clip, and by the end it will have you questioning your own choice.

The Dove #choosebeautiful video:

Would I choose average, or beautiful? The question stopped me cold. Because I knew that if I had been given this choice, I would pick average immediately, without hesitation, every time.

And shockingly, so would at least 83 per cent of Australian women.

This disheartening result came from a recent Mamamia and Dove survey of over 11,000 women. In this survey, we asked women how they felt about themselves, their beauty and their confidence.

We found that for the vast majority of women, their overall confidence in their beauty was shockingly low.

Related: The scary link between Facebook and the way you feel about your body.

We found that those who chose average were 140 per cent more likely to dress for others compared to those who chose beautiful.

Not only this, but they were 146 per cent more likely to have negative thoughts about their appearance and to feel less confident about their beauty as they aged. They were also three times more likely to have no favourite feature of their body.

These results are upsetting, and true for the majority of Australian women – including me.

I was recently asked what my favourite body part was for an article – and I couldn’t come up with an answer. I sat there blankly, frantically telling myself to make something up so I could just respond.

I answered with “eyelashes”, for lack of a better reply.

But surprisingly, this wasn’t always the case. When I was a teenager, I would confidently tell anyone who asked that my favourite part of my body was my hips. But as time wore on, I saw image after image of beautiful small-hipped women, both on and offline, and these days I am no longer as sure.

So where did all that confidence go? Why do I, and most women around me, no longer feel beautiful?

Related: It’s time to love what you see in the mirror. Unconditionally.

I know I am well and truly in that 83 per cent who would call themselves average, but I also know that that is not where I want to be forever.

Instead, I want to be like those 17 per cent of women who chose beautiful. The women in the survey who were more likely to believe that inner confidence makes someone more beautiful than their looks. The women who said they were confident to leave the house without makeup.

Because after all, these results don’t tell us that the lucky 17 per cent are beautiful on the inside and out and that the rest of us are somehow lacking.

No, they absolutely and definitely do not.

They tell us that all of us make a decision every day to choose beautiful, or to choose average. It’s a personal decision, and one that only you can make. But it’s a decision that can make an enormous difference to how you feel about yourself every single day.

What would you choose – average or beautiful?

Here at Mamamia Women’s Network, we #choosebeautiful:

Team MM chooses beautiful.

So knowing all this – knowing the facts, and how you feel – will you choose beautiful?