"They have a kid, a cute girl, but she has her dad's nose. "For example, a Russian marries an Armenian," Valeria elaborates helpfully. If I had a glass of multi-chutney carrot-juice mix before me, I'd do a bright orange spit take. "The ideal of beauty used to be different." "But that's a relatively new thing," I reply. Everyone fixes up their face if it's not ideal, you know? Everyone strives for the golden mean. Valeria grows pensive, which in her case means rolling her eyes slightly upward without changing anything else about her face. "And the beauty that you embody is very Western. "But Amatue seems to be all about the Eastern philosophy of reincarnation," I say. When seated across the table from a living Barbie and stuck for topics, by all means go for collegiate bullshit. Am I supposed to be attracted, to be repulsed, or to ponder the sexism of that dichotomy? Here, though, the act of looking feels like an experiment conducted on me. As a result, she almost throws our idea of a supervixen back in our face.įor a while, I just look, which would normally be rude.
Except we don't expect them to comply with this oppressive fantasy so fully. Her features are the features we men playfully ascribe to ideal women it's how we draw them in manga and comics and video games. Her beauty, though I hesitate to use the term, is pitched at the exact precipice where the male gaze curdles in on itself. A living Barbie is automatically an Uncanny Valley Girl. Evolution has taught us to think of big eyes as beautiful-it's a so-called neotenous feature, implying youth-but tweak that delicate scale just a little and you've got a wraith, or an insect. The Internet rumor mill claims she has had her eyelids trimmed to achieve this look, which seems unlikely and sounds nightmarish. Part of what I'm seeing is an optical effect brought about by makeup (there is essentially an eye drawn around each eye), but even after I make the mental correction for it, Valeria's eyes remain chillingly large. The eyes, the staring eyes, are the scariest. Her mouth, like in a cheap cartoon, is the only part of her that moves. "Hello," she says in Russian, remaining perfectly still. There might be some Loretta Lux-style postproduction to her photos, sure, but it's not crucial. In the flesh-the little of it that she hasn't whittled away with what she says is exercise and diet-Valeria looks almost exactly like Barbie. A one-eyed smiling-skull pin perches on her sky blue top, pushed to the side by the veritable shelf of silicone around which her whole body seems arranged. She's holding a handbag shaped like a lantern. Her mouth is frozen in a vacant half-smile the teeth are small and almost translucent. Her brand-new hair extensions, the color of Chardonnay, hang straight down, reaching her nonexistent hips. I walk through the restaurant, which is vaguely porny, like everything else in Odessa, and Barbie gets closer and realer with every step. By her side sits sidekick Olga "Dominika" Oleynik, one of Lukyanova's several doll-like apostles. She is seated in the back of the restaurant in her classic pose, preternaturally upright, head cocked.
Was she real-in the sense of existing in the three-dimensional world-or a Photoshop experiment run amok? Like everyone, I was staring too hard at her image on-screen to actually listen. Most of the Amatue videos were intended to be some sort of transcendental self-help lectures. She preferred to call herself Amatue, a name she claimed had appeared to her in a dream. Valeria wasn't in on the Barbie branding. However odd her own view of perfection, she appeared to have achieved it. Still, where others had dabbled, she went for broke. The Western media were quick to dub her the "Human Barbie," but Valeria was hardly the first Homo sapiens to willingly make herself look like a doll-she wasn't even the first to earn the moniker: Some tabloid-damaged Brit laid claim to it a few years back.
Barbie real life no makeup skin#
Her improbable looks-the Margaret Keane peepers, the head quizzically cocked like a sunflower too heavy for its stem, the plasticky skin and wasp waist-reached the West when her self-shot home videos began drawing gawkers to YouTube. You would know that meeting Valeria Lukyanova is the closest you will come to an alien encounter. If you saw the pictures I saw, you would understand.
Imagine a blind date, with all the attendant "Does she look like her picture?" jitters, multiplied by the queasy fear that she does look like her picture. Per Barbie's instructions, I enter Kamasutra, a brightly lit Ukrainian version of an Indian restaurant.