Mattel, the company that makes the Barbie doll has announced a new line of dolls, the Barbie Fashionista dolls, which will be markedly different from the traditional, anatomically impossible Barbie doll.
The tiny-waisted, long-legged, dolls with their ‘perfect’ breasts have come under fire for promoting unrealistic standards of beauty among girls and young women. The Barbie Fashionista line is Mattel’s effort at creating a more ‘real’, easy-to relate-to doll, which will celebrate a number of skin, body, clothing and hair types.
The new Barbie comes in three body types: curvy, petite and tall. The website claims that the line includes seven different skin types and 18 hairstyles.
Here’s what some of their new dolls look like:
Barbie will no longer have to walk in heels unless she really wishes to. The new dolls will be able to wear flats, and the shoes come in two sizes.
Time magazine reports that for Mattel to continue doing what they were doing would have been a death sentence- Barbie doll sales plummeted 20 percent between the years 2012 and 2014 and continued to fall till last year. Lego ousted Mattel as the biggest toy company in the world, while Elsa captured little girls’ imagination in a way that Barbie no longer could.
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