Not so long ago, images of a young girl washed over the Internet. She was impossibly blonde and impossibly shaped, and surely it was all a masterly work of Photoshop. Right? Michael Idov travels to meet with Eastern Bloc Barbie herself and discovers that her world is far more bizarre and twisted than anything in the photos
Per Barbie's instructions, I enter Kamasutra, a brightly lit Ukrainian version of an Indian restaurant. 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. If you saw the pictures I saw, you would understand. You would know that meeting Valeria Lukyanova is the closest you will come to an alien encounter.
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. 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. Still, where others had dabbled, she went for broke. However odd her own view of perfection, she appeared to have achieved it.
Valeria wasn't in on the Barbie branding. She preferred to call herself Amatue, a name she claimed had appeared to her in a dream. Most of the Amatue videos were intended to be some sort of transcendental self-help lectures. I'm not sure. Like everyone, I was staring too hard at her image on-screen to actually listen. Was she real—in the sense of existing in the three-dimensional world—or a Photoshop experiment run amok?
Well, Valeria exists, all right. She is seated in the back of the restaurant in her classic pose, preternaturally upright, head cocked. By her side sits sidekick Olga "Dominika" Oleynik, one of Lukyanova's several doll-like apostles. I walk through the restaurant, which is vaguely porny, like everything else in Odessa, and Barbie gets closer and realer with every step. Her brand-new hair extensions, the color of Chardonnay, hang straight down, reaching her nonexistent hips. Her mouth is frozen in a vacant half-smile; the teeth are small and almost translucent. She's holding a handbag shaped like a lantern. 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. 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. There might be some Loretta Lux-style postproduction to her photos, sure, but it's not crucial. This is live. This is happening.
"Hello," she says in Russian, remaining perfectly still. Her mouth, like in a cheap cartoon, is the only part of her that moves. The eyes, the staring eyes, are the scariest. 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 Internet rumor mill claims she has had her eyelids trimmed to achieve this look, which seems unlikely and sounds nightmarish. 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. A living Barbie is automatically an Uncanny Valley Girl. Her beauty, though I hesitate to use the term, is pitched at the exact precipice where the male gaze curdles in on itself. 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. Except we don't expect them to comply with this oppressive fantasy so fully. As a result, she almost throws our idea of a supervixen back in our face.
For a while, I just look, which would normally be rude. Here, though, the act of looking feels like an experiment conducted on me. Am I supposed to be attracted, to be repulsed, or to ponder the sexism of that dichotomy?
Compared with Valeria, Olga is just a human in a lot of makeup, no more or less augmented than any Miami Beach body, wearing some sort of purple Power Ranger outfit (self-designed, she later explains). I instantly understand why Valeria insists on having her around. She seems to be there for scale, to subtly underscore Valeria's ethereality.
We order food, in a manner of speaking. Kamasutra being an Indian restaurant, there are the usual three chutneys on the table—mint, tamarind, and chile. Valeria gets a carrot juice, then proceeds to upend all three chutneys into it, swirl the result with her straw, and drink. This gag-inducing mix, she explains, is her dinner; she is on an all-liquid diet these days. I don't quite know where to go from there, so I ask about her nails, which feature a complicated pointillist design of pink, lavender, and turquoise. "This is a fractal pattern from the twenty-first dimension," she explains matter-of-factly. "It took the longest time for the nail artist to get it right. It came to me in a dream."
"Just like your name, Amatue," I add.
"Yes."
When seated across the table from a living Barbie and stuck for topics, by all means go for collegiate bullshit. "But Amatue seems to be all about the Eastern philosophy of reincarnation," I say. "And the beauty that you embody is very Western. American, even."
Valeria grows pensive, which in her case means rolling her eyes slightly upward without changing anything else about her face. "I wouldn't say so. Everyone wants a slim figure. Everyone gets breasts done. Everyone fixes up their face if it's not ideal, you know? Everyone strives for the golden mean. It's global now."
"But that's a relatively new thing," I reply. "The ideal of beauty used to be different."
"That's because of the race-mixing."
If I had a glass of multi-chutney carrot-juice mix before me, I'd do a bright orange spit take.
"For example, a Russian marries an Armenian," Valeria elaborates helpfully. "They have a kid, a cute girl, but she has her dad's nose. She goes and files it down a little, and it's all good. Ethnicities are mixing now, so there's degeneration, and it didn't used to be like that. Remember how many beautiful women there were in the 1950s and 1960s, without any surgery? And now, thanks to degeneration, we have this. I love the Nordic image myself. I have white skin; I am a Nordic type—perhaps a little Eastern Baltic, but closer to Nordic." LINK
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