+
Family

After 57 years, Barbie finally gets the makeover that really matters.

She still can't bend her arms, but it's a start.

If you're one of the millions of people who've bought Barbie dolls and wished for them to look a bit more like you do, today is your lucky day.

For the first time in her 57-year history, Barbie comes in different body shapes: petite, tall, curvy, and original.


Meet Barbie, Barbie, Barbie, Barbie, and Barbie. Image Image from Mattel.

The new dolls are part of Barbie's Fashionista 2016 line. In total there are four body types, seven skin tones and 18 eye colors and hairstyles available — plus some dolls who can wear flat shoes! You can pre-order the new Barbies online or find them in stores everywhere starting in March.

This is a really big deal, and it happened because consumers made it happen.

Consumers have long been asking Mattel to offer Barbie dolls with realistic measurements and received little response. So, they started spending their money elsewhere. In 2014, Barbie doll sales dropped a record 16%. The same year, Barbie lost her title as the world's best-selling doll to Hasbro's Queen Elsa doll. It seems it was finally time for Mattel (Barbie's parent company) to listen to consumers and give them the realistically-shaped dolls they'd been asking for since the last century. After two years of development, we're meeting them for the first time.

They're all still named Barbie, though, which is definitely going to create confusion at the next toy family reunion. Image Image from Mattel.

This isn't the first time Barbie's had a big makeover.

For the first nine years she was on sale, Barbie was only available in one color: white. Christie, a black doll, debuted in 1968, but the first black doll named Barbie wouldn't appear on store shelves until 1980.

Even then, the black, Latina, and Asian dolls weren't really accurate — just Caucasian Barbie dolls in new colors with new hair. It would take Mattel another 20 years to better embrace diversity and release different facial styles.

Celebrate, but not too much, 'kay, girl?

Over the past few decades, Barbie has run for president several times, broken up with Ken, experimented with temporary tattoos, and even renovated her dream house after it turned out her wheelchair-using friend "Share a Smile Becky" couldn't fit in the elevator. Last year Mattel ran their first commercial featuring a boy (gasp! but not really) playing with Barbies and loving every second of it.

All of these, no matter how long they've taken to materialize, are good changes. But none of them addressed the biggest issue people have had with Barbie for decades: her body shape.

The silhouette of the original Barbie doll and Barbie's new curvy body type couldn't be more different. Image from Composite/Time Magazine.

Barbie's body shape isn't just an unrealistic stereotype — it's also physically impossible. If you were shaped like that; you'd die.

In 2013, Rehabs.com decided to show what Barbie's quality of life would be like if she were a real human. The results were ... unsettling.

You can see the full infographic here, but be warned, it's going to make you feel really bad for a plastic doll. Image from Rehabs.com.

Here's what Barbie would be like if she were real:

  • She'd be 5 feet, 9 inches tall, weigh about 110 pounds, and have measurements of 32-16-29.
  • She'd only have half a liver and a few inches of intestine, making digesting food pretty much impossible.
  • Her size-3 feet and little ankles would be unable to support her frame, forcing her to walk on all fours.
  • Her tiny neck is too spindly to hold up her giant head, so she'd be forever staring at the ground.

So, instead of being an aspirational symbol of femininity with a great career and a handsome boyfriend ... she'd be a weird demon creature that people take blurry night vision photos of in the woods and make horror movies about.


Can you imagine a skinny, bobble-headed creature shambling out of the woods on all fours? That's IRL Barbie, and she's terrifying.

Today's announcement is a step forward, but it's not the end of the road.

Now don't get me wrong. Growing up, I loved my Barbies. Some of them still live in an old naugahyde suitcase in my parent's garage. I'm delighted to see Barbie starting to look more like a person, like me, like you, and like the people we love. And I'm hopeful that with these changes, we'll see even more inclusivity from Mattel in the future — like trans Barbie, or elder Barbie, or veteran amputee Barbie, or pierced punk Barbie with a shaved head, among so many others. But most of all, this announcement reminded me that no mass-produced doll, in whatever shape and with whatever ethnicity, can be fully representative of the multitudes in all of us.

And I'm pretty sure Barbie would give me a high-five for that. You know, if she could bend her arms.

Sponsored

ACUVUE launches a new campaign to inspire Gen Z to put down their phones and follow their vision

What will you create on your social media break? Share it at #MyVisionMySight.

True

If you’ve always lived in a world with social media, it can be tough to truly understand how it affects your life. One of the best ways to grasp its impact is to take a break to see what life is like without being tethered to your phone and distracted by a constant stream of notifications.

Knowing when to disconnect is becoming increasingly important as younger people are becoming aware of the adverse effects screen time can have on their eyes. According to Eyesafe Nielsen, adults are now spending 13-plus hours a day on their digital devices, a 35% increase from 2019.1. Many of us now spend more time staring at screens on a given day than we do sleeping which can impact our eye health.

Normally, you blink around 15 times per minute, however, focusing your eyes on computer screens or other digital displays have been shown to reduce your blink rate by up to 60%.2 Reduced blinking can destabilize your eyes’ tear film, causing dry, tired eyes and blurred vision.3

Keep ReadingShow less

Karlie Smith shows the meal she's bringing to the restaurant for her son.

A mom who admitted she packs her 2-year-old a meal when they go out to dinner has started an interesting debate on TikTok about restaurant etiquette and how it applies to young children.

The video posted by Ohio mom, Karlie Smith (unbreakablemomma on TikTok), has received nearly 600,000 views and has over 1,850 comments.

“Call me cheap, call me whatever, but if we’re going out to a restaurant, I’m packing my kid a meal," Smith, 21, said in her post. "I do this for many reasons. On Friday nights, my family and I get together, and tonight, we’re getting food out. My son is not getting food out.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Pop Culture

Man rewatches shows from his childhood and his recaps of the bonkers storylines are priceless

Rob Anderson's hilarious recaps of shows like "Mighty Ducks," "Beethoven," and "7th Heaven" might make you wonder how they got made in the first place.

@hearthrobert/TikTok

These plots makes zero sense.

While there are no doubt some timeless classics from our childhood that remain every bit as amazing as we remember, many are straight-up cringey upon a later viewing. Really, it’s to be expected as societal viewpoints change…sort of a marker of how far we’ve collectively come.

And so, what do we do with these problematic pieces of old-school pop culture? Well, we can certainly update them to better reflect a more modern attitude, but that also comes with a set of potential problems. Or we could simply never watch them again. Certainly an option given all the content out there. But then we might miss an opportunity to better understand what seemed to work for the mainstream then, and why it doesn’t work now.

And then there’s the third option—allow ourselves to be entertained by their cringiness.

That’s certainly the route taken by Rob Anderson. Over on TikTok, Anderson has taken ultra-popular movies and television shows from his childhood and given them hilarious recaps capturing how absurd some of the storylines are.
Keep ReadingShow less
@Steve_Perrault/Twitter

Some moments never get old.

On November 19, 1999, a man named John Carpenter made game show history and quite possibly gave us all the greatest game show moment of all time.

Carpenter was a contestant on the very first season of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” shot in America. Hosted by the late Regis Philbin, the quiz show featured three "lifeline" options to help them with difficult questions, the most popular being able to “Phone-a-Friend.”

Carpenter had impressively not used a single lifeline for any of his questions. That is, until question 15. The million-dollar question, to be exact.

Keep ReadingShow less
Joy

Woman decides that she is the love of her life and marries herself at her retirement home

“I said, you know what, I’ve done everything else. Why not?”

77-year-old woman decides she's the love of her life and marries herself.

We joke about marrying ourselves or a platonic friend if some arbitrary amount of time has passed without a proposal from an imaginary suitor. And sure, some people do wind up marrying a friend in more of a business arrangement, but it's not very common that someone follows through with marrying themselves.

Dorothy "Dottie" Fideli, decided that she was going to break the mold. The 77-year-old sat down and thought about all of the things she had done in life and who was with her the entire time cheering her on. It was an easy answer: herself. She was her biggest cheerleader, the person who always showed up and the love of her life, so Fideli made the plan to marry herself.

On a beautiful May day, friends and family gathered in the O’Bannon Terrace Retirement Community, where Fideli is a resident, to witness the ceremony.

Keep ReadingShow less
Joy

12-year-old Texas girl saves her family from carbon monoxide poisoning

She knew something was wrong with her mom and brother, which wound up saving her whole family.

Fort Worth 12-year-old helps save family from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Carbon monoxide is called a silent killer for a reason. Many people don't realize they're experiencing carbon monoxide poisoning before it's too late. The gas is colorless and odorless and tends to have a sedating effect that causes people to sleep through the fatal poisoning. Having carbon monoxide detectors is one of the most effective ways to identify the gas before it's too late to get out of the house, but not every home has one.

A little girl in Fort Worth, Texas, experienced a terrifying encounter with the deadly gas, but her quick actions saved her entire family. Jaziyah Parker is being held up as a hero after she realized something was wrong with her family members and called for help.

The girl called 911 after she noticed her mom pass out. On the call with the dispatcher, Jaziyah says she thinks her mother has died before explaining that there was something now wrong with her baby brother, who was just 5-months-old.

Keep ReadingShow less

Drew Barrymore speaks during the FLOWER Beauty launch at Westfield Parramatta on April 13, 2019, in Sydney, Australia.

Drew Barrymore, 48, has been in the public consciousness since she starred as Gertie in 1982’s mega-blockbuster, “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” a performance that earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. So, it makes sense that many people of a certain age feel as if they’ve grown up with her.

Barrymore has consistently starred in hit films and movies that are rewatchable cable-TV staples, such as “Charlie's Angels” (2000), “Never Been Kissed” (1999), “Scream” (1996), “The Wedding Singer” (1998), “50 First Dates” (2004) and “Fever Pitch” (2005).

Now, she’s an even more significant part of people’s lives as the host of “The Drew Barrymore Show,” which runs every weekday on CBS. So far, the show has been a big success, attracting an average of 1.21 million views per show, and ranks as the #4 talk show in syndication. It was recently renewed through the 2024 season.

Keep ReadingShow less