Eight months ago, a fashion doll boasting “realistic” proportions made headlines. Modeled after the average 19-year-old American woman, Lammily was dubbed the “Normal Barbie” for not having the mutant measurements of the iconic doll from our childhoods.
After a successful crowdsourcing campaign, Lammily is finally here, with optional acne and all (more on that later). But will kids actually like her?
Lammily creator Nickolay Lamm decided to present his new doll to a second grade classroom in Pennsylvania. And no surprise, the doll was a hit.
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“I like her!”
“She looks like my sister.”
“She looks like she’s a regular girl going to school.”
The students also noticed Lammily’s feet can bend and look more realistic, unlike Barbie’s perma-arched toosties that wouldn’t support the weight of her body.
“I wanted to show that reality is cool,” Lamm tells TIME. “And a lot of toys make kids go into fantasy, but why don’t they show real life is cool? It’s not perfect, but it’s really all we have. And that’s awesome.”
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Instead of high heels, a tiny hairbrush, or a pink convertible, this doll comes with much more interesting accessories. Plus, you can buy a reusable sticker pack to give Lammily some cellulite, scrapes, stitches, scars, freckles, acne and many other real-life distinctions. Lamm emphasizes to TIME that he wasn’t trying to promote an image of violence, “Look, we all get boo boos and scratches. Life isn’t perfect, we all sometimes fall down but we get back up.”
Barbie’s impossible looks, size and even her career choices have been analyzed (and criticized) for decades, but it does seem lately that the 55-year-old doll has lost her edge. Barbie sales plunged 21 percent compared to the same time last year, according to the Washington Post, as young girls are gravitating towards Mattel’s Monster High dolls, Disney’s “Frozen” line, as well as games on tablets and smartphones. None of these toys look realistic either, so girls don’t necessarily prefer toys that look more like them, but they do go for what’s popular and what their friends are playing with.
That’s why there should always be space on the shelf for toys like Lammily, so we can teach more children that average is beautiful and flaws are perfectly normal.
Lammily is available for purchase on this website.
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Tag: Body Image
If You Want Your Daughter to Dream Big, Have Her Play With This Classic Toy
Walk down the aisle at your local toy store that houses Barbie, and you’re apt to see Mattel’s signature female toy dressed for all sorts of aspirational careers — from astronaut to entrepreneur. But do the job choices of the popular blonde influence girls that play with her? Two researchers wanted to answer this question.
Aurora Sherman of Oregon State University and Eileen Zurbriggen of the University of California, Santa Cruz randomly assigned 37 girls between the ages of four and seven to play either with a Doctor Barbie, an identical Barbie in sexualized clothes, or a Mr. Potato Head doll for five minutes. Next, they presented the girls with pictures of the backgrounds to various occupations that did not feature any people in the image. One career depicted was gender neutral (restaurant worker), five were of jobs that a higher concentration of women work (librarian, daycare worker, teacher, nurse, and flight attendant), and five were of jobs that a higher percentage of men work (police officer, construction worker, pilot, doctor, and firefighter). After presenting each picture, the researchers asked the girls if they could do that job and if a boy could do that job.
The results, published in the journal Sex Roles, were startling: Girls that played with either Barbie (which had the same unrealistic body type, regardless of how she was dressed), saw fewer career options for themselves than boys. Girls who played with Mr. Potato Head saw about the same number of career options for themselves as boys. In an email that Sherman wrote to Megan Gannon of Live Science (a website featuring the latest in scientific news), she said, “One psychological theory indicates that adult women who are given cues of sexualization (through dress or pictures) perform worse on academic tasks. My co-author and I speculate that Barbie might work as the same kind of cue for girls, but more research is needed to fully test this speculation.”
Our guess is that now, a lot of parents are going to encourage their daughters to play with the goofy-looking spud instead of the trendy lady from Malibu.
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