Human Barbie

I will admit that as a young boy I undressed my little sister’s Barbie doll.  Barbie was not like the other cherubic to absolutely plump baby dolls in my sister’s collection.  Barbie was leggy and thin and had bullet-like breasts.  Barbie exuded a weird and wholly confusing sexuality that piqued my interest.   Underneath the frilly clothing, once I disrobed her, I discovered Barbie as intolerably stiff and cold.  She had no remarkable features.

I felt slightly repulsed, actually.

Today, a human version of Barbie can be found wandering the streets of certain Ukrainian cities.  Her name is Valeria Lukyanova, though she often refers to herself as Amatue, a name that came to her in a dream.  I first read about Valeria in an online GQ Magazine article.   Michael Idov, met and interviewed Valeria for the article in GQ and described the meeting as “the closest you will come to an alien encounter.”

Human Barbie loves to exercise.  Well, her exercise is a bit closer to an obsession.  The exercise helps Human Barbie maintain the same peculiar body shape as plastic Barbie.  The bullet-like breasts on Human Barbie are thanks to the wonders of breast implants.  That impossibly narrow waist is maintained by the aforementioned exercise and consuming only the tiniest portions of low-calorie foods.  Valeria is a “Breatharian."  Breatharians believe that people can give up food and water and live on “prana” which is Sanskrit for “life air” or “life force.”  Human Barbie is not opposed to entering into long periods of fasting.

The transformation from Valeria Lukyanova to Barbie also requires perfectly ordered platinum hair, bright blue contact lenses, and a great deal of artfully applied make-up.  Once transformed, Barbie begins to affect all the proper poses and the stiffness of plastic Barbie.

Michael Idov noted, in meeting Human Barbie, that she seemed to relish that fact that some men find her somewhat repulsive.  Among her more repulsive traits is her penchant for spewing outright racism when she talks, details of which I will not bother to air in this writing.  As for me, I got over Barbie the first time I saw her unnatural plastic body all those years ago.

I am not particularly attracted to Human Barbie.

The photographs posted today are of the living and breathing Valeria Lukyanova.

--Mitchell Hegman