By Lime Green Giraffe Social Media Director, Jaiden H.
Even if you have never owned a Barbie doll, I am sure a lot of us can say that we grew up in a Barbie world, whether we literally grew up using plastic figures to express our creativity and imagination, or, in the metaphorical sense, grew up surrounded by the stigma that a girl's life purpose is to be a “Barbie girl in a Barbie world”. I am sure that when most people think of a perfect Barbie doll, they think of the blonde haired, blue eyed, skinny, pink dressed girl who has mansions, and boyfriends, and shoes, and cars, and who is good at practically everything she does, and can be a fashionista while also being coy while also being smart while also being confident and attractive and… yeah, she’s a lot of things. A lot of things that society would say makes her perfect. The perfect sister, the perfect friend, the perfect daughter, the perfect partner, the perfect student, and overall the perfect girl.
Now, some may say that Barbie is nothing but a doll. She is a chunk of plastic manufactured so that girls could dress them up and comb their hair (at least that’s what I thought when this topic was first brought up in my English class), but think about it. Little girls use these dolls to project and fantasize about an image of their future selves. After all, that is the reason Barbie was created. At the time (in the early 50s) girls only had access to baby dolls for play. Mattel, the founding company of Barbie, was a man-facilitated organization that created Barbie so that these children could get a sense of their future lives, their older lives, where they could pretend to be women. The Mattel jingle of a 1959 television advertisement went:
“Barbie, you’re beautiful… Someday, I’m gonna be just like you. Till then I know just what I’ll do: Barbie, beautiful Barbie, I’ll make believe that I am you.”
You could only imagine the effects Barbie had on children back then. Especially when they
were most likely playing with a doll that looked nothing like them.
First Barbie doll released to the public
Source: https://www.history.com/news/Barbie-through-the-ages
This was the doll that every girl was using back then.
I feel as though we can all say that this doll is not even close to an accurate reflection of the human race. This doll was so unrealistically proportioned and her light skin and hair were not the genes that every little girl had, not then, not now.
In the documentary, Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie, released in 2018, it is safe to say that Mattel has finally come to the realization that the dolls they were manufacturing and how they were advertising them were not doing the future generation of women any good. Though it took many years, many opinions, and many tries, Mattel has finally gotten an idea of what true diversity in the beauty world looks like. Check out Mattel’s new Barbie line that they released back in early 2020:
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/01/29/new-diverse-vitiligo-barbies/
These Barbies are not only size inclusive, but they are skin inclusive, ability inclusive, gender inclusive, and much more! Now, when I hear kids singing “I’m a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world”, I smile, because with Mattel’s new idea of what they want their brand to embody, everyone is a Barbie!
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