A New Study Reveals Barbie Dolls’ Adverse Effects on Young Girls’ Body Image

The Barbie, a plastic doll with moveable limbs, has been a stalemate in the lives of many little girls across the globe. Originally Caucasian, blonde-haired, and blue-eyed, over the years the Barbie line has made it a point to diversify their dolls by creating international collections. Occasionally, Barbie's physical features would be altered to better match different ethnicities; however, Barbie's dimensions have never changed. According to recent studies surrounding the Barbie's body measurements, it is no wonder that little boys everywhere could break off the heads of their sister's Barbies in one fell swoop.

Rehabs.com, an online directory of resources that help treat noxious-substance addictions and eating disorders, has brought attention to the ill effects Barbie's figure has had on young girls. Though Barbie is inanimate and cannot ingest food, the living humans who produce the dolls have consciously decided to manufacture a doll of inhuman proportions. Even if Barbie were to be living, she would not survive for long.

In order to shed light on the mixed messages that Barbie is projecting to the youth, Rehabs.com  teamed up with the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders to create an infographic comparing a white bra and panty wearing average American women to a white bra and panty wearing life-size scaled Barbie. Upon casting a quick glance over the life-size Barbie and the average woman, the most obvious commonality between both is the bust size. A chart comparing the body measurements of the Barbie and woman show that in fact, both white bras are filled to capacity. While the average woman has a bust measuring 34 to 35 inches, Barbie's bust comes in just 3 inches shorter, at 32 inches.

The only other measurement that not only comes close to a real woman but is the exact same size is the circumference of the head. Though it is easy to pass over Barbie's head as being comparable to a real woman because her plastic body proportions are only a fraction of an actual woman's, Barbie's head is a healthy size. At 22 inches round, Barbie's head matches the average head size for American females, 21 inches to 22 inches.

According to the infographic, however, if life were to be breathed into Barbie, she wouldn't be able to lift up her head. The Barbie's neck is about a half foot narrower than the average woman's and is double the length. In parallel to the neck not being able to carry the weight of her head, Barbie's feet, a size 3 in girls, would not be able to carry the weight of her entire body. As a result, Barbie will have regressed to pre-revolutionary times because she would "have to walk on all fours." Even if Barbie was to survive by dragging her head around all day, she wouldn't be alive.

With a 16 inch waist, half the size of a healthy woman's waist, Barbie would only have space for "1/2 a liver and a few inches of intestine." If the makers of Barbie were going for a representation of someone who didn't eat, it would make sense that the design of the Barbie, void of an intestinal tract, would make it impossible for her to digest food. In fact, the odds of Barbie's manufacturers thinking through this logic, is not too far off. Rehabs.com describes a 1960's "Slumber Party Barbie" that included a weight scale and "How to Lose Weight" book, with the doll.

According to Rehabs.com, "When girls aged 6 to 10 were assigned to play with either a very thin doll or an average-sized doll, the children who had played with the thin doll ate significantly less food." With that said, though every little girls wants to feel one of a kind, aspiring to have the chest-waist ratio of Barbie, is "1 in billions of billions", a virtual impossibility.