Barbie has always been known as the perfectly proportioned platinum blond that looks nothing like real women. To combat these unreachable standards of beauty, doll designer Nickolay Lamm created a "normal" Barbie that resembles the average 19-year-old.
She wears no makeup and has cellulite, acne and stretch marks. She's just like us!
"All fashion dolls look the same! I wanted to give them a realistic makeover," Lamm says. He wanted to make sure the doll represented typical growing pains, like getting bruises or having a patch of acne, which are normal parts of life.
The Pittsburgh graphic designer was inspired to create a "normal" Barbie after reading reports about what Barbie would look like if she had the measurements of the average 19-year-old.
Shattering his own body insecurities, Lamm created the Lammily doll that is the perfect imperfect version of Barbie. "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," Lamm says. " I looked and felt terrible. I thought a lot about how everyone's body is different, but we measure ourselves with one standard."
Lamm says he wants the dolls to inspire young girls to look past appearances and focus on what they love to do.
The Lammily doll has curves that are scaled to mirror the average teen girl. With the goal to have girls embrace real-world flaws, the doll also comes with stickers that can be placed anywhere. These include freckles, glasses, moles, stitches, scrapes, bruises, scars, zits, stretch marks, cellulite, mosquito bites, grass stains and tattoos. Yep, sounds just like the average 19-year-old woman.
"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 says. "But I wanted to show that life is beautiful and reality is all we have."
Lamm raised over $500,000 through crowdfunding, crushing his $95,000 goal. So far, he has received over 22,000 orders for the realistic Barbie doll. Orders are set to ship late November.
According to this YouTube video, the normal Barbie is a hit.
Photo Credit:Tracheotomy Bob/Flickr
