3D Printing Used To Redesign A Barbie Doll As A Real 19-Year-Old Girl

How old do you think Barbie is? I don’t mean how many years has she existed. I mean how old is she? She’s a 19-year-old girl or close to it, right? Everyone knows that a Barbie doll doesn’t look like a real person, but what you might not know is that in order for her proportions to be real; she would have to be an alien or some sort of half-human. It’s true. I learned this a few months ago when I wrote Typical Barbie Body vs. Typical Real Woman Body.

Here is an excerpt from that article, “On Barbie’s body, the neck is twice as long and six inches thinner than it should be. If you had this, you wouldn’t be able to lift your own head. Barbie has a sixteen-inch waist. If your waist was only sixteen inches, you would only be able to fit half a liver and a few inches of intestines in there. Her ankles are only six-inches, which wouldn’t support her body. She would have to crawl everywhere. Her wrists are only 3.5-inches, and her feet are about a size 3 in children’s shoes.”

So, as you see, it’s not even a matter of her being an ‘unrealistic’ size. It’s more her being an ‘impossible’ size. Artist Nickolay Lamm of MyDeals.com took the measurements of an average 19-year-old girl and used them to create a 3D model of what a Barbie doll might look like if it was modeled after a real person. As you can see, the 3D model version of the Barbie doll (based on the proportions of a 19-year-old girl) looks a lot more human and a lot less alien.

Nickolay used Photoshop to color the 3D model look so it looks like an actual Barbie doll, and you can see that in the photos below. He had a great time with this project. It’s another fun use of 3D printing, and how it can give us new perspectives on things…even silly things like Barbie dolls.