Barbie with Down Syndrome?

The toy company Mattel on Tuesday announced its first Barbie doll with Down syndrome, which was created in partnership with the National Down Syndrome Society.

The new doll is from the “Barbie Fashionistas” collection, an “inclusive” line that has featured dolls with prosthetic limbs, wheelchairs, hearing aids, vitiligo, no hair, and curvier figures.

Lisa McKnight, the executive vice president and global head of Mattel’s Barbie & Dolls Portfolio, said in a press release that “we are proud to introduce a Barbie doll with Down syndrome to better reflect the world around us and further our commitment to celebrating inclusion through play.”

I like the idea, but the execution is lamentable. The reinvented Barbie is decidedly inaccurate: The doll with Down syndrome doesn’t look like she has Down syndrome.

The doll has a slightly shorter frame and longer torso. The patterned dress is blue and yellow with butterflies, which are symbolically associated with Down syndrome, and her accessories include ankle-foot orthotics.

Although Mattel claims that “the new face sculpt features a rounder shape, smaller ears, and a flat nasal bridge, while the eyes are slightly slanted in an almond shape,” the doll hardly embodies the condition’s facial characteristics. Instead, she looks like an unexceptional girl-next-door; the stereotypical Barbie is so unrealistically proportioned that the doll supposedly with Down syndrome looks completely average.

The doll has a necklace with a three-chevron pendant representing the three copies of the 21st chromosome, thus treating genetics as an external quality and Down syndrome as an accessory that can be willingly removed. 

Mattel sanitized the genetic condition as aesthetically pleasant. I fear Mattel didn’t depict Down syndrome accurately because the company worried the condition is visually off-putting. Concealing typical Down syndrome facial features means young girls with the condition will see a refined version of themselves cloaked in conventional attractiveness. Just as the conventional Barbie is a hypersexualized feminine ideal that normalizes cosmetic beauty, the doll who allegedly has Down syndrome develops a distorted image of the condition.

I appreciate that Mattel, over time, has expanded Barbie’s pursuits beyond the confines of domestic chores and gave her a wide range of physical characteristics, including nine body types and 35 skin tones. But the effort to make Barbie more “normal” should not entail disfiguring Down syndrome traits to satisfy what might be viewed as “normal.” When we engage with the diversity — including anomalies — of human life, we revise what we consider “normal,” and, hopefully, we recognize all as equally valuable. 

I spent many hours with Barbie dolls as a young girl; I remember begging my mother each time we were in Target to let me pick out yet another sparkly dress or set of tiny furniture. Although this is melodramatic, I think playing with dolls cultivated my love for writing fiction: Exercising God-like control over an imaginary microcosm cultivates the imagination.

Barbie is simultaneously iconic and ambiguous; girls can portray her however they like, encouraging girls that they — like the doll — can do anything. “Playing pretend” for young girls feels so vividly real. Mattel stated that the doll with Down syndrome was created “to allow even more children to see themselves in Barbie.” Perhaps some girls will have to wait for the next edition to truly see themselves.