Barbie turned 50, and the dolls story still sparks debate, from her unrealistic proportions to her impact on ideas of female beauty. The article tells how Ruth Handler created Barbie, how the doll became a global hit, and why it is still compared with symbols of the American economy. Readers also get the success story of Mattel and surprising facts about how Barbie became one of the worlds most recognizable brands.

The buxom blonde with the wasp waist has turned 50! Since March 1959, when Barbie Millicent Roberts from Wisconsin first came into the world, little has changed in her appearance. Since her debut, there has been debate over whether it is possible to live with such proportions. But she is no less popular.
"Barbie's mother" came from a large family of Polish immigrants living in Denver, Colorado. Together with her husband, artist-designer Elliot Handler, former Paramount Pictures stenographer and future billionaire Ruth Handler founded a company that produced picture frames, and some time later, after watching her children Barbara and Kenneth play, she began making doll furniture from scraps of wooden frames, which proved more in demand than the company's main products.
After some time, an "adult" doll was created as well - a teenage girl with a feminine figure. Ruth patented her invention and named it Barbie - after her daughter.
Barbie made her debut in 1959 at the annual New York Toy Fair. At first, wholesalers greeted the new product skeptically, so the Handlers began selling Barbie directly to toy stores. The new doll immediately caught the eye of the main consumer group - girls and their mothers - and the company Mattel, for which the Handlers worked, was flooded with orders.
Scientists and women's rights activists unanimously assert that the shapes invented by Mattel are not only unattainable in real life, but because of the imbalance of proportions would simply not allow a woman to keep her balance.
At Mattel, they say they have not tried to determine how realistic Barbie's proportions are on a human body scale. Among those who have tried to do so, no one has yet calculated what the proportions would be of a woman with the breasts, legs, and hips of the eternally young Miss Roberts. According to calculations by specialists from the University of South Australia, only one in 100,000 real women could theoretically have proportions close to Barbie's.
Barbie is often compared to a Big Mac - and there are reasons for that. Both symbols of America have become a kind of measure of the state of the national economy. It is known that McDonald’s for a long time artificially held down the price of its signature Big Mac, and Mattel also tried not to raise Barbie's price - the first model cost only 3 US dollars. Then inflation took its toll, but even so Barbie's retail price in the United States has in recent years remained at 10 dollars. Of course, collectible rarities are an order of magnitude more expensive - in 1998 one of the early Barbies sold at auction for 26.5 thousand US dollars.
Ruth Handler, who died of cancer in 2002 at the age of 85, deserves a monument in front of the entrance to her company's headquarters - thanks to Barbie, the modest toy company made it onto the list of the world's 500 largest companies within five years. Before leaving Mattel in the mid-1970s, Handler held the positions of president and chairwoman of the board at the company, becoming a role model of a businesswoman for a new generation of American women herself.
Today, about one million Barbie dolls are sold worldwide every week.