All former little girls know that the Barbie doll set an ideal that we could never match.
Barbie has a 19-inch waist, 33-inch hips and a 36-inch bust. There are few women like her – especially the 19-inch waist part.
Now an artist has constructed a 3-D model of what Barbie would look like if she adopted the average measurements of a 19-year-old American girl: 31-inch waist, 33-inch hips and 32-inch bust.
Artist Nickolay Lamm did the new Barbie as well as a previous mock-up of Barbie without make-up. He says he’s taken heat for redesigning Barbie because people are telling him that she’s “just a toy” and can’t do any harm.
But what if her unrealistic measurements do affect little girls? I don’t know if they’d be as powerful as hearing their female role models put themselves down for not being perfect or reading Cosmo’s endless lists of why we don’t (and probably can’t ever) measure up to an ideal, but I don’t think this Barbie is any less appealing. It would be great if Mattel would offer her to their Barbie customers and see what the market decides.
(The original article is here: Huffington Post UK.)