scorecard
  1. Home
  2. Retail
  3. What Barbie would look like if she had the body of an average 19-year-old

What Barbie would look like if she had the body of an average 19-year-old

Jim Edwards   

What Barbie would look like if she had the body of an average 19-year-old
Retail1 min read

Barbie

Nikolay Lamm

Human v. Barbie

One of the strangest new children's toys on the market is Lammily, a "real-life" doll for girls launched in 2014 by artist Nickolay Lamm.

Lammily has the proportions of an actual teenage girl - and is thus shorter and stockier than Barbie, the impossibly thin top-selling doll from Mattel.

Lammily sales are doing well: "We've done $1.5 million in sales exclusively from online. We have yet to try out speciality or mass retail, so we're excited about that," Lammily told Business Insider this week.

Several years ago, Lamm became obsessed with Barbie's distorted body. His obsession began in part due to his own attempt to obtain a "perfect" body as a teenager. "Back in high school, I starved myself and exercised to exhaustion to have a set of six-pack abs. After achieving my desired BMI, I looked and felt terrible," he wrote recently on his blog.

Two years ago, Lamm gave Business Insider a set of illustrations in which he tried to reshape Barbie using the proportions of an average American 19-year-old. "I feel that this is as close as you can get to a real life representation of a Barbie-proportioned woman standing next to an average sized woman," he told us.

Lammily

Lammily Dolls

Hello, Lammily!

The average 19-year-old woman was modeled using these measurements, as described by the CDC:

  • 64.29? height
  • 33.62? waist
  • 14.09? upper arm length
  • 14.45? upper leg length
  • 20? head circumference
  • 15? neck circumference

Barbie, at 1/6 scale, would have the following measurements, Lamm believes:

  • 69? height?
  • 36? bust?
  • 18? waist?
  • 33? hips
  • ?22? head circumference
  • ?9? neck circumference

The illustrations below show what a "Barbie" might look like if she was a normal American. (And you can see how they eventually led Lamm to create Lammily.)

READ MORE ARTICLES ON


Advertisement

Advertisement