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.
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.)
As Lamm maps Barbie next to an average person, the differences become obvious quickly.
Barbie is huge! She is 5 inches taller than the average young woman.
Barbie isn't just a thin woman -- her waist is almost half the size of an average woman's, just 18 inches.
Barbie's features start to look increasingly unrealistic the more closely you examine her.
She's not just thin. She's stick-like.
She's also missing a ribcage.
There's one difference that's really creepy. See if you can guess what it is ...
Barbie's hands are tiny!
Barbie has a smaller torso but a larger bust size. If she were real, you might assume she'd had some work done.
Note that you're looking at the "same" person -- only the hair color and the body proportions have been changed.
See Also:
- These photos show why a teen retailer is beating Victoria's Secret in the lingerie game
- 17 shopping secrets to save time and money at Trader Joe's
- This 19-year-old model is the new face of Victoria's Secret
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