'Normal Barbie' keeps it real with cellulite, stretch marks, and acne

Move over, Barbie. A new doll with scars and cellulite is stealing your limelight.

She’s the Lammily doll, a “normal Barbie” dreamed up by a toymaker who believes children should have access to dolls promoting simple beauty and realistic bodies—because if the real Barbie were human, she’d be forced to walk on all fours while being physically incapable of lifting her head. Frustrated by Barbie’s unrealistic proportions, Nickolas Lamm, Lammily’s creator, designed a doll of his own scaled to the measurements of the average 19-year-old woman.

“I feel like a lot of toys put kids in a fantasy and I’m trying to make real cool.” Lamm, 26, told MSNBC. “Real is all we have anyways.”

Lamm’s creation began as an art project in 2013—supported by crowd funding that exceeded his $95,000 target goal by more than $400,000—and became available for purchase and delivery Wednesday. An alternative to the idealistic blonde Mattel doll, Lammily is a shorter, broader brunette with natural-looking make-up and a casual, sporty wardrobe. If Barbie is the picture of air-brushed fantasy, then Lammily is the picture of scarred realism, complete with an add-on sticker pack featuring pimples, moles, cellulite and scars.

In the design phase, Lamm created a model according to dimensions supplied by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, then did a side-by-side comparison with Barbie. Lammily’s wide hips and thick legs resist the idea of the perfect figure—and the response to her debut was overwhelmingly positive. After Lamm began his crowd-funding effort, he raised almost $100,000 within a single day. Pre-orders for the product later skyrocketed to just under 16,000.

“The message I want to send is that it’s not what you look like,” Lamm told CNN. “That doesn’t define you. What you do does.”

Lammily—with her scars and stretch marks (yes, there’s a sticker for that), pimples and cellulite—reflects a message most people can’t help but relate to. An estimated 50 to 90 percent of women will develop stretch marks in their lifetime, and over 90 percent of women have cellulite on their bodies. Acne, affecting an estimated 80 percent of people under age 30, is incredibly common as well.

In an interview with TIME, Lamm admitted marketing a doll with stretch marks won’t go down quietly with some critics who will snicker at his innovation. But the doll’s realistic characteristics reflect his sincerity, he insists. While he knows some people took the project as a joke from its inception, “I hope there are enough people who believe what I believe. I think 25 percent to 30 percent will think the stickers are stupid and the rest will think it’s good.”

The dolls will be mailed to Lamm’s crowd-funding backers no later than Black Friday and thousands more pre-ordered dolls also will ship before the holidays. Looking into the future, Lamm plans to release a male doll and also follow with a Build-A-Bear Workshop model, where children could customize their own Lammily dolls.

The realistic toy differs in one other way from her picture-perfect competition: She doesn’t have a name. Lammily is the name of the toy company, but each doll will be named by its owner. The Lammily website eventually will include a database where people can register their doll’s name, Lamm told CNN.