Barbie Loves MAC…and she lived in sin for 43 years

At 47 years old she has worked with over 50 leading designers and has one of the most recognisable faces in the world. And now the 11-inch fashion icon has branched out into beauty with what is set to be the most collectable make-up range of the season. So collectable in fact, that patrons are forbidden from buying more than one of any product.

“Many women’s first experiences with fashion and beauty were playing with Barbie. Today this fantasy continues with Barbie Loves MAC, a color collection that allows women to rediscover their inner girl,”-Richard Dickson, senior vice president of Marketing, Media and Entertainment, Worldwide, Mattel.

There is even a new limited edition MAC Barbie.

I would like to hereby and for the first time use my position as a blogger to defend this collection against criticism like this;

…MAC has turned to Barbie as the new face of beauty. …Barbie is a plastic mock-up of an unattainable female form. The models in the new Barbie Loves MAC ad campaign are styled to look like dolls; their facial expressions are vacant and frankly, a little frightening… Barbie Loves MAC rests on a more retro notion of women as empty silicone shells. I want to think that this line will fail because young women will be smarter than that, because we will resist the urge to be a plastic head, because we have lost the desire to idealize impossible breasts and feet that only fit in stiletto heels, but I don’t think that’s true. Instead, I think the people at MAC are on to something. I’m just disappointed that this is what’s being pitched to young women right now, particularly since I know that MAC…can do better.

 -Susan Wagner, a blogger at BlogHER.org: http://blogher.org/node/16124

First, I must defend the woman herself.

Barbie as an icon has become synonymous with the mental image of a pony-tailed valley girl carrying her intestines around in her blood-stained Louis Vuitton (although this image has been altered further of late, with the realisation that impossibly small feet would also have real-life Barbie crawling around on all fours). While I fully understand the reservations people may have about fostering such an unrealistic view of the female form from a young age, I maintain that toys are the one place where unachievable chest measurements should be condoned.  

Children are not idiots. They know that a doll is a doll just like a toy airplane is a toy airplane. And when a little boy finds himself to be an adult with neither the aptitude nor the desire to be a professional pilot, it hardly comes as a shock. Women aren’t expected to be dolls. Whether or not we can connect the OC to bulimia nervosa, a Barbie with a day wardrobe consisting of six ball gowns and scuba suit isn’t a role model for the modern girl.