Frustrated with the unrealistic beauty standards perpetuated by Barbie and her ilk, artist Nickolay Lamm set out to create a doll that has proportions more representative of the average woman. To do so, Lamm took data from the CDC about the "average" 19-year-old woman, who is about 5-foot-4, with a 33-inch waist, and created a doll that mirrored those proportions. Her name is Lammily, and her tag line is “Average is beautiful.”
"I think a realistic-size doll is important because, when I look at current dolls on the market, I can't help but notice how disproportionate they are," said Lamm in an email to Salon. "By making a doll real I feel attention is taken away from the body and to what the doll actually does."
To really drive home his point, here's a video Lamm made of Lammily being airbrushed into Barbie:
After his initial concept images went viral, Lamm started a wildly successful crowd-funding campaign, resulting in 13,621 backers preordering over 19,000 dolls for a total of $501,384. The doll goes on sale at 9 a.m. today, so here’s your first look at Lammily, who has a very J.Crew fall look going on right now.
Lamm also decided to create a set of stickers called "Lammily marks" which will enable the dolls to be adorned with some of the flaws that real women face, including cellulite, acne, stretch marks, tattoos, and a variety of booboos (not to mention what appears to be a horrific appendicitis scar).
Some of the marks are admittedly a little intense, but Lamm hopes that parents will see them for their symbolic value. As he writes to Salon in an email, "The booboo sticker is a little graphic and I hope parents don't take it the wrong way. It just represents the occasional booboo which we sometimes get and symbolizes that life has is its ups and downs, it's not perfect, but we get back up and move forward!" He says he got the idea for the stickers from a tweet by Demi Lovato suggesting that Barbie make dolls with cellulite. "The two stickers of cellulite and stretch marks, that's more so just a symbol that reality is beautiful. Whether or not kids want to play with those stickers over others, I don't know. But I've seen kids playing with all the stickers at the same time, and it looks like they have fun playing with it. It's like they're making their own creation."
For now, Lammily only comes with white skin and long, silky-straight brown hair, but Lamm says he plans to release more diverse incarnations by 2015. As he says on his website, “I’m hoping to extend the line to embrace diversity. From race to body type, I want this doll to be true to you!" Life in plastic with stretch marks: It’s fantastic!
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