Raechele Cochran Gathers, MD When I was a kid, my Barbie was white, supper skinny and blonde. She looked nothing like me. Later, I got another Barbie. She looked just like my white Barbie—just dipped in chocolate. But I loved her, because at least she was brown like me. My childhood dipped-in-chocolate-Barbie still didn’t have hair like mine, or lips and cheekbones quite like mine, but she was definitely a step in the right direction. In her brown eyes and deep brown skin, at least some of me was validated.
Barbie Gets Diverse
By the early 2000’s Mattel’s Barbie was getting a lot less popular than she used to be. Parents sought to give their children dolls that carried a different message; dolls that better reflected a diversity of skin colors, sizes, shapes and hair textures. Competitors unveiled dolls that were an alternative to Barbie’s mostly unattainable and decidedly narrow representation of beauty. Barbie began to lose lots of popularity.
In 2016, Mattel launched the Fashionista line of Barbie dolls. Barbie began to get diverse with the Fashionista line. It featured dolls that better reflected the multiplicity of our society. There were curvy Barbies, Barbies with different hair textures and Barbies with a greater diversity in facial features.
The public responded positively to the new Fashionista Barbie dolls. In fact, in 2019, Mattel reached a 5 year high in profits from selling Barbie. And for almost every week of 2019, the top selling Barbie was a curvy Barbie with an afro!
The public had an appetite for dolls that reflected different interpretations of what was beautiful. For starters, many people wanted dolls with darker skin, kinkier hair textures and more ethnic looking features. Barbie continued to evolve and try to oblige.
2020 Barbie Gets More Diverse
In early 2020, the Fashionista line was expanded to include even more non-traditional types of Barbie. As a dermatologist I was elated to see Barbies with both alopecia and vitiligo. Now, there are even Barbies in wheelchairs and with prosthetic legs. The bald Barbie is particularly useful for children that are suffering from hair loss, and helps show them that they are enough, and beautiful without hair!
Vitiligo, a non-contagious skin disorder, is often stigmatized, and can cause depression in those affected by it. People can be unkind to those with vitiligo—staring, asking offensive questions, or being outright hostile. The vitiligo Barbie helps to normalize this skin condition, and is wonderful for children both with and without vitiligo.
Diversity in Beauty
Barbie is an American icon, and by making her more diverse, Mattel has made both a smart and business savvy decision. I am thrilled by the initiative taken by Mattel to make Barbie more inclusive of our diverse range of experiences. Our world and our ways of being in it are evolving, and Barbie is finally looking a lot more like the world around us.
