In the midst of a mid-life crisis, separated from her long-time partner, and becoming tiresome and freakish to the public eye, Barbie has finally been shoved out of her position as the best selling fashion doll in the United Kingdom — a welcome event for adolescent girls around the world.  

Barbie has been hobbling around with her improbable proportions — she’s a seven-footer with a voluptuous 38-inch chest, miniscule 18-inch waist, and curvaceous 40-inch hips — since 1959, and consumers have happily acquired over one billion Barbies in 150 countries. Despite the fact that such a blond behemoth would have to crawl on all fours to carry such an unlikely frame, she has been both a staple of the toy chest and accused of fostering devastating body-image problems for adolescent girls. It seems, that at the ripe age of 45, Barbie is crawling on all fours out of the spotlight.
  
Barbie’s successor, however, isn’t all that much better than Barbie; Bratz dolls have now replaced Barbie in the UK as the top selling fashion doll, and they are a set of strangely hydrocephalic, enormously-eyed dolls with the screechy slogan, “the girls with a passion for fashion!” One of the line of products is a duo of dolls called Bratz Secret Date, a package advertised with the promise that it is “a night you’re sure to never forget as you share a first date with the Bratz and Bratz Boyz as they laugh over a midnight smoothie, slow dance under a full moon, and find themselves getting closer than ever…”

Wholesome midnight smoothie or no, the acquisitive little Bratz characters will likely inspire ideals that are different, although not necessarily better, than Barbie’s bizarre wardrobe full of personalities. Even if the emphasis of the Bratz is as vacuous as Barbie’s, perhaps a Barbie-inspired era — complete with its consequent body-image trauma — is becoming outdated, unfashionable, and ultimately unpopular.  

Mimi Hanaoka