Barbie, or Barbra Millicent Roberts, is admired by young girls almost everywhere through out the world. Her long, beautiful hair, her perfectly symmetrical face, with gorgeous eyes, and the perfect body. Barbie has everything that a little girl, even a woman wants in her own life. Big houses, over 40 pets, different variety of jobs, friends, and of course her looks. What harm can she do? If you’re wondering what the answer is, it’s a lot. She is supposedly a ‘perfect’ girl, but that in itself is a flaw. She is a ‘perfect’ role model fore many girls, but is it bad that you can be too perfect?

When Barbie first came out in 1959 as “Teenage Model”, parents were complaining about the size of the dolls chest, because it was too big for a doll. Not only that, but her whole body was disproportional. If her body was a real size body then her chest would be 90 cm or 36 in, her waist would be 45 cm or 18 in, and her hips would be about 83 cm or 33 in, on top of that she would be 182 cm tall which is 5 ft and 9 in. If teenage girls would try to look like the actual doll then they would most likely end up anorexic and still not accomplish their goal. Eventually, in 1997, the company that produces the Barbie dolls remolded the body with a bigger waist, but that still didn’t change the body very much. It was still a thin doll.
According to the people that own Barbie dolls, the dolls don’t just have one special trait, but many or whatever the people decide it should be. The different age groups of girls imagine the doll what ever they want her to be. That leads to living the imagined life, the life that they most likely want for them selves, through the doll. Which will lead them to the “perfect lifestyle.”

Women that not only want to live the life of Barbie also want to look like her. Women who desire to look like Barbie are called the “Barbie syndrome”. These women usually get plastic surgery, which is worth thousands and thousands of dollars. Women that were young girls when the first Barbie dolls came out claimed that Barbie was their only friend. For example Cindy Jackson said, “This is who I’d like to be, this is glamorous.” She grew up a farm girl in Fremont, Ohio. “I wasn’t that good looking.” “I just wanted to look better,” says Cindy. “Barbie was the blank canvas I filled in all those years ago.” She moved to London, and the surgeries began. She completely transformed herself. Cindy got a nose job, lips fixed, forehead done, and everything else she could change. In the end all of the surgeries cost over 100 thousand dollars and that does not include the cost of maintaining her look as the real life Barbie.

Over 105 million yards of yarn is used for clothes to fit Barbie as well as her friends. Over 150 countries are marketing the doll. Also, the market for Barbie is 1.5 billion dollars per year. Instead of making that much money on a doll, they could be making that much money for a better cause. In my opinion the Barbie doll is not worth all the money. Another way the Barbie dolls are causing people to waste money is by buying them from other people just because they are the original dolls that were made when the first came out when they came out. People buy them from places like Amazon, and EBay. Most of them are worth about 10,000 dollars if the conditions are good.

Barbie dolls are bad role models for young girls and are also big money wasters. They give the wrong impression of what the ideal body of a child or woman should be, by representing them with disproportional bodies. Since most women want to look like Barbie they get surgeries that cost thousands of dollars, which is a waste of money, as well as very dangerous.