Barbie Size In Real Life

Life-size Barbie: Galia Slayen says her Barbie dolls were a factor in her battle with anorexia. Is that like saying video games cause violence?

Her eyes are too big for her face, her neck is too long to hold up her head, she’s so thin that researchers say she would unable to conceive a child in real life…but is that any reason to vilify the Barbie doll, that darling of kids and collectors?

Galia Slayen seems to think so. In a laudable effort to call attention to anorexia, which the young woman from Oregon battled in high school, she created a papier mâché effigy of a Barbie doll and appeared with it on NBC’s “Today” show on April 18.

Airbnb Is Offering A Free Stay At Barbie's Malibu Dreamhouse

Ms. Slayen, with her long blond hair and blue eyes, bears more than a passing resemblance to a Barbie doll herself. Apparently, therein lay the problem. Ms. Slayen identified so closely with her beloved Barbie dolls, she told Today, that she “figured that was what I was supposed to look like” and fell down the slippery slope of an eating disorder.

While not blaming Barbie for her anorexia, Slayen calls the idealized plastic icon an “environmental factor.” Indeed, along with fashion magazines, movies, and television advertisements. There’s really no relief in modern culture from the bombardment of unattainable female beauty images.

Scaled up to life-size, a Barbie doll would be approximately 5 feet 9 inches tall and have a 36-inch bust, an 18-inch waist and 33-inch hips. Those are pretty unrealistic proportions, to be sure. Still, that’s healthier looking than Slayen’s bizarre creation, with its handless, attenuated sticks for arms, balloon-like breasts and head that appears too small for its body.

Disney Pixar Toy Story 4 Barbie Doll With Movie Inspired Details

Barbie never was meant to be realistic in appearance, or a physical goal for young women to achieve. She is a clotheshorse, a role player, and a blank canvas for the imaginative projections of enthusiasts young and old. It's sad that something that was created to be fun has caused Ms. Slayen so much grief.

Monitor journalism changes lives because we open that too-small box that most people think they live in. We believe news can and should expand a sense of identity and possibility beyond narrow conventional expectations.

Your subscription to The Christian Science Monitor has expired. You can renew your subscription or continue to use the site without a subscription.Like many girls in America, Galia Slayen played with Barbie Dolls when she was growing up.  In high school when she had long since outgrown the doll she decided to use the familiar childhood toy to educate her peers about body image issues. With the help of her neighbor, Slayen created a “Life-Size Barbie” with the famous doll’s exact proportions, 39-18-33. (For reference the average measurements of an American woman today are 35-27-37.5).

Barbie And Ken

The result was shocking, and as Slayen says, “Despite her bizarre appearance, Barbie provides something that many advocacy efforts lack. She reminds of something we once loved, while showing us the absurdity of our obsession with perfection.”

This body conforming obsession is one that many girls deal with on a daily basis.  In our semester and year-long Group mentoring workshops, we address this and many other issues facing adolescent girls.  The topics we discuss include Media Literacy & Body Image, to help girls develop critical thinking skills in response to media messages and celebrate the unique qualities inherent in themselves and others; Self-Esteem, to educate girls on the relationship between self-esteem and behavior, outlook and decisions; and  Stress, Coping & Self-Care,  to help girls to evaluate the origin of stress in their lives as well as ways that it can impact them both positively and negatively. Visit  www.bigsister.org for a more detailed list of topics we cover in our Group Mentoring programs. Click here to find out how to volunteer.

• There are two Barbie dolls sold every second in the world. • The target market for Barbie doll sales is young girls ages 3-12 years of age. • A girl usually has her first Barbie by age 3, and collects a total of seven dolls during her childhood. • Over a billion dollars worth of Barbie dolls and accessories were sold in 1993, making this doll big business and one of the top 10 toys sold. • If Barbie were an actual women, she would be 5’9″ tall, have a 39″ bust, an 18″ waist, 33″ hips and a size 3 shoe. • Barbie calls this a “full figure” and likes her weight at 110 lbs. • At 5’9″ tall and weighing 110 lbs, Barbie would have a BMI of 16.24 and fit the weight criteria for anorexia. She likely would not menstruate. • If Barbie was a real woman, she’d have to walk on all fours due to her proportions. • Slumber Party Barbie was introduced in 1965 and came with a bathroom scale permanently set at 110 lbs with a book entitled “How to Lose Weight” with directions inside stating simply “Don’t eat.”

Barbie Doll With Real Woman's Measurements

Posted on May 18, 2011, in Food for Thought and tagged Barbie doll, eating disorder, Group Mentoring, Health. Bookmark the permalink. Leave a comment.Twitter icon A stylized bird with an open mouth, tweeting. Twitter LinkedIn icon The word in. LinkedIn Fliboard icon A stylized letter F. Flipboard Link icon An image of a chain link. It symobilizes a website link url. Copy Link

Narrator: Barbie is one of the most popular dolls in America. But that doesn't mean that she's loved by everyone. For years, women advocates have criticized the doll for her proportions, which they say set unrealistic and damaging body expectations for young girls.

In response, her maker, Mattel, created a handful of new sizes in 2016, including Curvy Barbie. But how unrealistic is Barbie really? Is Curvy much better? And where does Ken fit into all of this? That's what we set out to discover.

Human Barbie' Strives To Become Breatharian Who Lives Off Light And Air

Benji Jones: Hello, and welcome to our Barbie experiment. Today, we're going to open up each of these three dolls and do a little bit of math to try to figure out what they would look like if they were life-size. We have your more typical Barbie over here. We've got a Curvy Barbie, which is kind of a newer doll. And then, of course, we also have a Ken doll because I couldn't not get Ken. So let's get started.

Narrator: First, we measured each of the dolls, their height, waist, and so on, and used some high-school algebra to figure out their life-size measurements. Then, we compared them to a real-life woman for comparison: our colleague Jensen.

Narrator: Although Jensen is the average height of an American woman, she has a smaller-than-average waist. But still, it's not nearly as thin as Barbie's. If we scale Barbie to life-size, her waist would be a mere 50 centimeters, and her hips, just 71 centimeters. And if Jensen had Barbie's proportions, this is what she would look like. She'd have shorter arms, a longer neck, and tiny feet. In fact, they'd be so small that she'd have trouble balancing and would be forced to walk on all fours.

It's Barbie's 60th Birthday, So Here Is What She Would Actually Look Like In Real Life

And what about Curvy Barbie? Is she any more realistic? Actually, yes, at least relative to Jensen. Her waist would be around 63 centimeters and her hips around 90, the same as Jensen's. Now, here's Jensen with Curvy Barbie's proportions. Not that different. Though, of course, she still wouldn't be able to walk upright.

Now, we can't forget about Ken. This time, I stood in for comparison. If we scale Ken up to my height, his waist would be just 63 centimeters, and he would also have unusually small feet, long legs, and larger calves. But his biceps, well, mine are actually bigger. Uh, Ken, you better watch out.

So as you might expect, most Barbies look nothing like average Americans, as fit as they may be. In fact, researchers found that the chance of a woman having traditional Barbie's proportions is less than one in 100, 000. And that's a problem.

How Barbie's Body Size Would Look In Real Life (14 Pictures)

Deborah Tolman: My name's Deborah Tolman. I'm a professor of critical social psychology and women and gender studies at Hunter College at City University of New York.

Tolman: Dolls actually have an enormous effect on girls' and boys' sense of themselves, their ideas about body, particular thin-body ideals. If you have an ideal, and you're never able to achieve it, you don't need a psychological study to show that it makes you feel bad.

Narrator: But there are plenty of studies that do. A study published in 2006, for example, found that young girls who are exposed to Barbie-doll images had more body dissatisfaction and lower body esteem compared to girls who were shown similar pictures of a larger-sized doll. But fortunately, it goes both ways.

Meet 7 Real Life Barbie And Ken Dolls

Tolman: Playing with a more, I guess, quote, chubby doll actually suppresses the desire for a thin body. So thinking about it only as negative really doesn't tell the full story because there are ways that we can introduce dolls and play that will actually yield protective effects.

Narrator: And that's why some experts applaud Mattel for creating Curvy Barbie. But it's also led to