The best kind of beauty is one that breaks the mold.

Mattel presented actress and singer Zendaya Coleman with a look-alike doll in late September at Barbie’s Rock ‘N Royals Benefit Concert for VH1’s Save the Music Foundation.

Immortalization as a doll is honorable, but Mattel’s gesture is to little effect. When a potential buyer asked about purchasing the Barbie on Twitter, Mattel explained that they created the Zendaya doll solely for the artist herself.

But Mattel should mass-produce the Zendaya doll. Apart from the obvious financial benefits for Zendaya and Mattel, the creation of this doll would diversify Barbie’s image and help broaden the beauty standard presented to young girls.

Zendaya is undeniably popular with tweens for having starred on Disney’s television show “Shake It Up” from 2010 to 2013 and “K.C. Undercover” starting earlier this year. She is wholesome without being boring, and consistently proves to be a positive, engaging icon for a younger audience, as well as for adults.

In the past, the Barbie brand has struggled with accurate representations of black women. About a decade after the first Barbie was created, Mattel released “Colored Francie” in 1967. Essentially, Francie was a darker version of the pre-existing white doll of the same name. Mattel’s failure with “Colored Francie” rests in the fact that she lacked the physical features of a black woman and was not marketed as extensively as the non-black versions of Francie.

Proper representation is important for the impressionable young girls wandering the aisles of toy stores. It’s important that girls grow up with images of femininity outside of Eurocentric beauty standards so that when they look in the mirror or look at their peers, they aren’t conditioned to see dark skin or textured hair as undesirable or ugly.

The Barbie with which Zendaya was presented is recognizably a woman of color and is a clear deviation from the fair, blonde-haired, blue-eyed ideal of Barbie. More importantly, the prototype has dreadlocks for which Zendaya was ridiculed on E! News earlier this year. “Fashion Police” host Giuliana Rancic made a snarky comment about how the artist’s hair “smells like patchouli oil or weed.”

Dolls in particular have been instrumental in sampling what children perceive to be beautiful. Studies have shown that kids have more positive connotations with light-skinned, white-appearing dolls than those with darker skin. The first example of this theory was offered by psychologists Mamie and Kenneth Clark in their famous 1947 doll test. The Clarks presented their child subjects with white and brown dolls, and measured the children’s positive and negative reactions to dolls in each color.

Margaret Beale Spencer, a child psychologist and professor at the University of Chicago, conducted a 2010 experiment similar to that of the Clarks’. The results confirmed that even in the modern, post-segregation, supposedly “post-racial” age, kids are absorbing messages about beauty and value based on skin color.

Some Twitter users have criticized Mattel’s choice of a light-skinned celebrity as a safe one due to the fact that colorism, a phenomenon that favors people of color with lighter complexion, is a pervasive factor in beauty standards upheld by the fashion industry. But Zendaya’s complexion is arbitrary in that she is an icon for young girls of color.

Ultimately, the wide-scale production of this doll would enable Mattel to continue to create a more diverse cast for kids to access. Barbie as a character has had her token minority friends, but women of color are more than accessories and the Zendaya doll would aid in this shift.

The creation of a Zendaya doll itself is already culturally significant, but even more of that good would be spread if the doll was available for purchase. What good is a doll that no one can play with?

Caroline Colvin is a sophomore magazine journalism major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at ccolvin@syr.edu and followed on Twitter at @fkacaro.

Published on October 7, 2015 at 11:52 pm