Like the rest of us, their proportions have changed since we last properly checked a few decades ago.
Modern-day Barbie and Ken are “more realistic” than their 1996 selves, which is good for kids, according to a recently published paper in which Australian researchers got to play with, sorry, study the dolls for our collective benefit.
“The positive changes we’re seeing in Barbie and Ken’s body shapes should provide some reassurance for health professionals and parents choosing these dolls,” said a co-researcher of this study and author of a study looking at the dolls’ proportions back in 1996, Professor Kevin Norton.
“Barbie and Ken are among the most recognisable cultural icons globally, and for many children, they’re an early and influential representation of what bodies of adults ‘should’ look like,” said lead researcher Associate Professor Sara Grafenauer from UNSW Medicine & Health.
The 2026 study showed Ken and especially Barbie underwent “very significant alterations” over the last 30 years (haven’t we all), with key measures of waist-to-hip and chest-to-waist ratios becoming “more realistic and falling within the 95% confidence range of the population,” the researchers wrote in Plos One.
In the initial 1996 study, published in Springer Nature in 1996, researchers scaled up Ken and Barbie’s physical proportions to human size and compared them to those of 135 females and 50 males aged 18-35 who were considered “representative … predominantly Anglo-Australian males and females”. Back then, the probability of a human woman looking like Barbie was less than 1 in 100,000, while Ken was “more realistic”, with a 1 in 50 chance of a human man turning out those proportions, according to that study.
In this new study, researchers took the body measures of the modern Barbie (they used the 2016 “Fashionista” range – Curvy, Petite, Tall, and Standard Barbie models, and new Malibu Ken) and scaled them up to an adult height of 170.18cm.
(Just FYI, the researchers explained that 170.18cm was a “standard international ‘Phantom’ height for anthropometry scaling studies”. We thought it best to include this in case some readers’ eyebrows shot up through the roof – as did this close-to-the-ground BP scribe’s – at the suggestion this was in any way average.)
Anyway, the dolls’ dimensions were then compared to the height-adjusted dimensions of the humans in the 1996 study.
Barbie in particular (and especially Curvy Barbie, predictably) had moved closer to the human shape, with waist-to-hip and chest-to-waist ratios for all four of the new Barbies falling within the 95% confidence range, “while new Ken was closer to the mean for all girths except ankle,” the research said.
As the researchers in the new study noted, the human comparisons volunteered for the study so they might have been leaner than the general population, meaning old and new Ken and Barbie were closer to certain body types of people who were happy to be measured for a Barbie and Ken study in the first place.
If you’re aware of new research you’d like the Back Page to play with – or rather, seriously examine – please send it to Holly@medicalrepublic.com.au.
