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Tech

Mattel Just Made Barbie a Vlogger

The millennial Barbara Millicent Roberts is on the YouTubes.
Rachel Pick
New York, US

In a move to keep its doll's interests in line with the current target market, Mattel has made Barbie Millicent Roberts a vlogger.

Teenagers are nuts for video-based social media, and are avid users of YouTube, Vine, and Snapchat. We have the current crop of adolescents to blame for the rise of the "Vine celebrity." (If you didn't know such a thing existed prior to now, I'm sorry.) So it only makes sense that Barbie, perpetually teenaged, would develop her own video channel to interact with her fans.

Since most actual Barbie fans are still aged in the single digits, the content in Barbie's first vlog is appropriately cutesy, bland, and G-rated. An earnest, doe-eyed CGI Barbie gives us a rundown of 10 Things About Her, including a dislike of spiders and a love of… painting her fingernails. "My parents are both writers, and they just really loved the idea of raising their kids by the beach," is how she explains her family's move to Malibu, as if one clause gives reason to the other.

You can see the effort Mattel has put into making Barbie a more worthy role model for young girls, a Herculean task that has been underway since the 90s. She's still white and conventionally pretty, but she counts science as one of her favorite subjects and entreats us to "be who you wanna be, right?" Since Barbie never has to grow up, I won't ruin things by telling her that as an adult, what you usually wanna be is asleep.