Bare Escentuals' Be a Force of Beauty advertising campaign

The New York Times had a feature on Bare Escentuals' much ballyhooed "Be a Force of Beauty" advertising campaign: Beauty Might Not Be Blind, but the Casting Call Was.

According to the NYT:

To find models that represented the elusive notion of beauty, the company held a blind casting call for women ages 20 to 60. Representatives from Bare Escentuals did not see the women who applied until they were selected for the campaign. Instead, they asked more than 270 women to complete a questionnaire about who they were and what they were like.

“My agent wouldn’t even tell me who the company was,” said Keri Shahidi, 42, one of the women chosen for the campaign, because the agent did not want the knowledge to affect her answers. The list was then whittled to 78 women, who were chosen based on their answers to the survey and brought in for interviews with casting agents. That list was reduced to 26 women, and after an a additional round of interviews, five women made the final cut.

Not seeing the women before they were chosen, Ms. Blodgett said, was a bit nerve-racking. “Do you know what a huge risk that is? What if all five of them were blonde, blue-eyed and 30?”

The follow-up trailers suggest that the casting agents screened the women by answers to questionnaires and audio interviews alone - sight unseen.  I have a hard time believing that these attractive women were selected through answers to questionnaires and audio interviews alone.