Barbie Doll’s Body Has Gotten More Real. Ken’s Waist Has Not.

Two anthropometrists, working independently, ran a tape around a plastic wrist barely thicker than a pencil. Then a neck, a chest, a waist, a hip, an ankle. Each site was measured twice by each of them, following the same international protocol used to size athletes and survey national populations. The subject was a Barbie doll.

The point was not novelty. In 1996, an Australian team led by Kevin Norton had measured the original Barbie and Ken this way and concluded that their shapes were essentially unreachable in real life, and three decades and one redesign later, Norton and colleagues at Adelaide University and UNSW Sydney wanted to know whether anything had actually changed or whether everyone had simply been guessing.

A doll is about a foot tall, which makes any direct comparison with an adult meaningless. So the researchers used allometry, the rule that in bodies of similar shape girths and lengths grow in step with height, to scale every doll up to a single standard stature of 170 centimeters, roughly five foot seven, the reference height anthropometrists use for exactly this purpose. Blow the doll up to that size and her waist, her hips and her calves all stretch by the same factor. What survives the enlargement is shape.

Scaled up, the 1959 Barbie was not merely thin. Her combination of waist, hip and chest sat so far outside the range of real young women that fewer than one person in ten million would have matched it.

The 2016 Fashionista dolls, which Mattel introduced with three new body types alongside the original, land somewhere else entirely. Measured and scaled, all four Barbies now sit inside the range covering 95 percent of the reference women for waist-to-hip and chest-to-waist shape, with Curvy Barbie closest to the middle. One long-running complaint turns out to have been aimed at the wrong feature: Barbie’s bust, scaled to adult size, has always run smaller than average, not larger.

The Yardstick Was Lean to Begin With

“Closer to real” depends entirely on which real people you use, and the comparison group here is the same one from 1996: roughly 135 women and 50 men, mostly Anglo-Australian university students who had volunteered for body composition research. Volunteers for that kind of study tend to be leaner than the general public, and the authors say so.

Holding the yardstick fixed is a deliberate choice. It lets you watch the dolls change without the population shifting underneath them, which is the comparison the researchers wanted. It also means Barbie is being judged against slim young Australians from the 1990s rather than against the adults walking past the toy aisle now, and populations have moved a long way in the interval, with adult obesity worldwide more than doubling since 1990. Measured against a contemporary sample, the gap would look smaller still, but for a reason that is not a compliment to anyone.

Ken’s Waist Went the Other Way

Ken’s numbers move in two directions at once, which is the study’s oddest result. Taken one at a time, nearly all of his scaled girths, his neck and chest and arms and thighs and calves, drifted closer to the average young man than the earlier Ken did.

But shape is a ratio, not a list. Two of Ken’s three ratios moved further from the male average rather than nearer, and he still sits outside the normal range. The paper traces this almost entirely to a single measurement: a waist that stayed narrow while everything above it broadened. The result is a torso that reads as more athletic and less attainable at the same time.

Both dolls also remain unusual on a measure the 1996 study never used, waist compared with height. The Fashionista range is a clear improvement on the originals, whose ratios were off the human scale, but the new dolls still land at roughly one in a thousand.

Closer to Average Is Not the Same as Wanted

Redesigning a doll and changing how children respond to it are separate problems. Barbie is sold as an aspirational figure and researchers scrutinize her accordingly, as in a 2023 analysis of 92 Barbie career dolls in medicine and science that found most of the medical dolls treating children and none of them fully meeting the safety standards of their fields. Body shape is read the same way, as a message the toy carries whether or not anyone intends it.

That reading is not only figurative. Toronto researchers found that girls aged six to fourteen automatically matched their own bodies to the dolls they were shown, and that the strength of the match depended on which body type was in front of them. In a British experiment, girls aged five to nine who played with ultra-thin dolls afterward chose a thinner figure as their ideal, and a follow-up play session with realistic dolls, or with toy cars, did not undo it.

Which leaves one measurement doing most of the remaining work. Ken’s waist is the part of the 1959 geometry the redesign left largely where it was, and no amount of chest or thigh will move it.

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