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Tag: normal Barbie

  • Normal Barbie: Are You Buying One This Christmas?

    It’s time to start shopping for Christmas and many little girls will be asking for Barbie dolls this year.

    While Barbie has changed a lot over the years, a recent doll called Normal Barbie may bring the biggest changes yet.

    The Normal Barbie, whose name is Lammily, is supposed to be modeled after the average 19-year-old woman.

    She is curvier than the original Barbie and has thicker arms and legs. She also wear less makeup and comes with acne, blemishes and stretchmark stickers.

    Over the years, many people have argued that Barbie’s unattainable looks make girls feel bad about themselves for how they look and give them an unrealistic image to try to live up to.

    The Normal Barbie was made to help inspire girls and women to be happy with the way they look and to feel confident about their bodies. The Barbie was developed by Nickolay Lamm.

    “I want to show that reality is beautiful,” Lamm said. “I just think she’s really relatable.”

    While the Normal Barbie may seem like a good idea, many parents don’t think they will appeal to their children.

    “My daughter probably wouldn’t give this doll a second glance as it is now,” Jill McSheridan, of Harwood Heights, said in an email to the Chicago Tribune. “Give this doll more hair color options and better clothes, then it’d be great.”

    Other women say that the original Barbie is fine the way she is and that just because she looks a certain way doesn’t mean girls expect to look like her.

    Do you think the Normal Barbie is a good idea?

  • Normal Barbie: Stretch Marks, Cellulite, Acne, & All

    The doll that everyone has been waiting for is finally here; stretch marks, cellulite, acne, and all.

    The Lammily doll, also known as the ‘Normal Barbie,’ was created by Pittsburgh graphic designer Nickolay Lamm to show that “reality can be beautiful.”

    The doll, which is now on sale online for approximately $25, sports no makeup, has brown hair, and is heavier around the midsection. The body, Lamm said, is proportional to an average 19-year-old woman, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    “I feel not only kids, but we as adults try to escape reality watching movies, playing video games and being on our phones all the time,” Lamm said. “But I wanted to show that life is beautiful and reality is all we have.”

    On January 18, a sticker expansion pack, costing $5.99, will be available for purchase. The pack includes 38 stickers, called Lammily marks, include cellulite, stretch marks, freckles, acne, glasses, temporary tattoo, scratches, bruises, cast, mosquito bites and dirt stains.

    Lamm explained that he faced many insecurities as a teenager which helped inspire him to create the doll.

    “Back in high school, I thought I was short for a guy at 5-5, so I starved myself and exercised to exhaustion to have a set of six-pack abs,” he said. ” I looked and felt terrible. I thought a lot about how everyone’s body is different, but we measure ourselves with one standard.”

    Lamm said he wants young girls to “think more about what they love and what they do and not as much as how they look. So if they have a doll that looks like everyone else, they won’t have to focus on looks so much.”

    What do you think about the Lammily doll? Leave your comments below.

  • “Normal Barbie” Project Set to Hit Shelves

    Since 1959, Barbie has been one of the most successful toys in the United States, making her way into the homes of young girls for generations. Those 55 years have not gone without its fair bit of controversy, however. Much fuss has been made over the years regarding multiple aspects of Barbie’s lifestyle, namely her choices of profession, wardrobe, and most recently, her obscene proportions. Now, though, a “normal Barbie” project by Nickolay Lamm has confronted Barbie’s unrealistic proportions issue heads-on.

    Instead of writing a moving op-ed about how detrimental it is for Barbie to possess such ridiculous body-measurements, Lamm decided to be a bit more proactive. In a recently started crowd-funding project, more than $150,000 has been raised to help Lamm’s dream come to reality.

    Lamm’s creation is a Barbie-esque doll which differs in one major area: body proportion. Lamm used statistics from the US Center for Disease Control’s database to research the proportions of an average, 19-year-old girl living in the United States: “Right now, there is no doll like this on the market. My goal is to make an affordable doll, which promotes realistic beauty standards, and that’s something which doesn’t exist yet… I spent lots of time and research to create a doll which daughters are going to love. She isn’t just a doll with typical body proportions, she’s a fun doll which just happens to have typical body proportions. And everything from the packaging, to future ad campaigns, to future online interactive worlds, will be designed to appeal to kids,” stated Lamm.

    The product comes to fruition on the heels of recent controversy caused by Barbie’s appearance in the most recent Sports Illustrated Swimsuit magazine. Much flak was raised on the internet by people complaining that glorifying Barbie’s unrealistic proportions was detrimental to the physical and mental health of future generations of females who would be struggling to live up to such an image.

    Barbie’s outlandish proportions have gone under account from multiple spheres, the most critical opinion of late coming from those at Rehabs.com, who created a campaign against the unnatural beauty of Barbie entitled “Dying to be Barbie.”

    Executives at Mattel are not planning to back down in the proportion battle anytime soon, however. Mattel recently released a statement from Barbie in which she claims that “Today, truly anything is possible for a girl. Let us place no limitations on her dreams, and that includes being girly if she likes. It’s easy to say the culprit is the color pink or the existence of makeup. That’s easy, and predictable. Neither prevents girls from excelling in their own fashion. Let her grow up not judged by how she dresses, even if it’s in heels; not dismissed for how she looks, even if she’s pretty. Pink isn’t the problem… Barbie® dolls” aren’t the problem. Models choosing to pose in a bikini aren’t the problem. The assumption that women of any age should only be part of who they are in order to succeed is the problem.”

    This statement was part of the bigger Barbie campaign to be #Unapologetic about anything in her life.

    While Mattel and Barbie have the right to portray their product in any way they which, context matters. In today’s day and age when people are more cognizant of the detrimental affects unachievable standards of beauty have on youth (both male and female), maybe it’s our responsibility to bolster a doll which does not suffer from issues of brittle bones, half a liver, or a much-too-large cranium. Perhaps the fact that Lamm’s initial funding goal of $95,000 was surpassed by $71,000 in less than one day has already answered that charge.

    Image via Nickolay Lamm