Delivered at History and Nostalgia: The 1950s in Popular Culture, 27th – 28th March 2025, Virtual Conference.

The field of Material Culture focuses heavily upon the concept of reflections. Objects and their properties influence our understandings of culture and social relations: in turn, culture and social relations can be shaped by the objects which hold importance within them. Barbie has been an object of great cultural significance since she was first released in 1959, where she made history as the first doll marketed towards children to boast an adult woman’s figure. Given her extensive legacy in pop culture and influence across the realms of film, music and fashion, it is unsurprising that Barbie has changed the physical reflections of individuals seeking to surgically emulate her look.

While Barbara Millicent Roberts has received no less than eleven doctorates throughout the years and has even worked for NASA, it is her iconic ‘blonde bimbo girl’ look which has been the source of both controversy and emulation. Despite studies showing that girls shown images of Barbie expressed higher levels of body dissatisfaction and claims that her unchanging plastic exterior has negatively impacted views of female aging, her design has remained largely unchanged since her original release. It is this design, one anatomically unnatural yet composed of desirable Western features, which fans have long sought to emulate through a variety of surgical means.

Material culture hallmarks of those seeking the ‘Barbie’ look often include botox, bleach and breast implants. This quest for beauty, however, can be more than skin deep. Joanna R. Sofaer’s recent and fascinating monograph The Body as Material Culture: A Theoretical Osteoarchaeology puts forward the idea of the body itself as an object through which society’s values can be read. While designed as a theoretical framework for bioarchaeology based on the materiality and historicity of human remains, it also offers a uniquely useful lens with which to analyse the recent trend of individuals having surgical interventions to achieve a ‘Barbie look’, from superfans having ribs removed to achieve her disproportionately small waist to “Barbie doll forehead” augmentation commonly performed in countries like Korea.

Headlines associating Barbie with the material culture of plastic surgery have grown disturbingly common, with a new ‘Human Barbie’ gracing the newspapers seemingly every month. While this could be the ultimate reflection of societal misogyny – an idea championed by feminist critics and backed up by a devastating admission that “if [the human Barbie interviewed] didn’t look like Barbie [she’d] be just another nobody” – it could also speak to a strange empowerment offered by objectification. People willing to surgically emulate Barbie, a mainstay of material culture, have been granted fame and fortune since 1993 when the ‘bionic woman’ Cindy Jackson turned herself into the first ‘living doll’. By becoming a living, breathing piece of material culture, the Human Barbie can achieve fame and notoriety through brand recognition, funding their own lifestyles by reflecting society’s desire to see plastic perfection made flesh.