Second graders at the St. Edmund's Academy in Pittsburgh appeared to be impressed with the realistic-looking features on the doll in the youtube video that has more than one million views since it was posted on Wednesday.

Dollmaker Nickolay Lamm, a Pittsburgh graphic designer, told the Washington Post he created the Lammily doll because he wanted to convey the message that "reality can be beautiful."

Barbie — the ultimate alpha girl with her bleach blonde hair and ridiculously unrealistic small waist and long thin legs — has some new competition: a "normal Barbie" with shorter, fuller legs, wider hips, and darker hair. Girls can also slap on some stickers with flaws like pimples, scars, and cellulite to, I suppose, mimic their own imperfections.


"She looks like my sister," gushed one student. "She isn't very thin," noted another. "I don't have other dolls like this," said a third girl. Others said she looks like a real person, a regular girl going to school. They imagined her doing activities that they do like running, swimming, and dancing because she could move her legs and arms more flexibly than Barbie.

Some predicted the Lammily doll would be a teacher, computer scientist, or pilot, while they said Barbie might be a surfer, cook, swimming teacher, or model.

All chose the Lammily doll as being most like them.

After raising more than $500,000 on a crowdfunding site earlier this year to design and manufacture the Lammily doll, Lamm plans to ship the doll next week to the project's backers. Others can buy the doll online for $25 plus $6 for the reusable sticker pack — that gives the doll freckles, scars, acne, cellulite, mosquito bites, and grass and dirt stains — just in time for the holiday shopping season.

Of course, the Lammily doll is not without critics, Mattel, manufacturer of Barbie, probably being at the top of the list.


A blog on the Huffington Post took the doll to task for having "controllable imperfections" that can be peeled off at will. "The bigger issue, though, is Lammily herself, a doll that — despite being peddled as normalized and body-positive — ultimately ascribes to a very narrow definition of beauty," wrote blogger Nikki Gloudeman. "Lamm claims he modeled his doll after the average proportions of a 19-year-old ... yet those proportions appear to be suspiciously thin."

Deborah Kotz can be reached at dkotz@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @debkotz2.