Pitt alum designs doll to challenge beauty standards

According to Nickolay Lamm, you don’t need to be a woman to understand the harmful effects of negative body image.

“Even though I’m a guy, I can still relate to what females go through,” Lamm said. Lamm, who graduated from Pitt in 2011 with a marketing degree, created a doll with the brand name Lammily. He used average body proportions for a 19-year-old woman from the Centers for Disease Control to promote “a more realistic standard of beauty.” The name Lammily is not the doll’s name, Lamm said, because children can instead name the doll themselves.

Lamm hopes to release his doll, which is available for pre-order on his website, in retail stores by early next year, though no plans are currently solidified.

Lamm’s doll is a brunette, wears “minimal makeup,” denim shorts, a casual top and white sneakers, compared to the glittery dresses, dramatic makeup and high heels typically worn by currently available dolls. 

Body image and self-esteem are important issues for Lamm, 25, who recalled picking out a doll for his niece a few years ago and noticing how strange the doll’s body proportions and tiny waist looked. 

“Fashion dolls are symbolic of the impossible beauty standards that you see all around us,” Lamm said.

Amy McDowell, a Pitt sociology and women’s studies professor, pointed to the societal criticism of the body proportions of Mattel’s Barbie, which a real person couldn’t have “without toppling over.”

“That standard is something that young girls and young women see all the time, and you can see that in the contemporary U.S., there’s a lot of scrutiny around body image,” McDowell said.

She said body image is a hot topic in her classes because students can understand the commonplace pressure to “conform to a certain standard of beauty.” 

Capitalism, body image and Barbie are closely intertwined, McDowell said. The commodification of the body has become routine, driving women to buy products such as makeup, fitness clothes and diet pills in a fleeting attempt to “obtain something close to the ideal.” 

“If the standard is really high, [to the point] that it’s actually unreachable, then it’s great for marketing products because the pursuit of the product is continuous,” she said. 

Over the last year, Lamm’s projects have reflected a growing interest in how dolls look compared to the average person. 

Last October, he published his “normal bodies” project, a series of images that used three-dimensional body mapping to create animated representations of what the average human male looks like, on his website. Last April, Lamm used Photoshop to alter photos of Barbie, Bratz and Disney princess dolls to show what they would look like without makeup on.

“When we play with things, when we interact with things, I feel like they subconsciously influence us,” Lamm said.

Heidi Bertels, a former Pitt professor who taught Lamm in an entrepreneurial process class, said Lamm’s project is a step in the right direction for positively influencing young children, specifically young girls.

“I think both men and women would like to see a healthier Barbie,” Bertels said. “I think a lot of parents would encourage their kids to play with the realistic Barbie.”

Bertels, who now teaches innovation management and entrepreneurship at City University of New York-Staten Island, said she was not surprised that a project like this from Lamm became popular with mass media and that he is “doing the right things” to get the attention. 

Lamm used Crowdtilt, an online program that helps users fundraise for a project or event, to raise the money to make his doll. He sold more than 16,000 preorders of the doll to generate more funding to pay for manufacturing. 

Bertels recalled teaching techniques like these in her Pitt class years ago, and Lamm said his marketing education at Pitt gave him the foundation he needed to have such a unique career. 

“I remember Googling ‘what should I do with the rest of my life’ on the bus home,” Lamm said, remembering his first day at a marketing job out of college. “If you want to do something different you have to start now.” 

After studying entrepreneurship, working a “typical” job did not appeal to Lamm at all. 

Instead, he monitors media trends and produces graphic art based on research and data. Before starting the Lammily project, he worked on a map of the United States that highlighted the best places to go in the event of a zombie apocalypse. He had to temporarily abandon that project in order to pursue Lammily. 

“An impression I got from Nick in class was that he was certainly a little different,” Bertels said. “He stood out. He had a different way of thinking. A good entrepreneur can see an opportunity.”

Lamm plans to create a whole line of Lammily dolls of different ethnicities and shapes — and a male companion doll — to keep changing the beauty standards that our children’s toys reflect. 

“It is just a toy, but there are things out there that are influencing us, and we don’t know exactly how they are, but they are,” Lamm said. “You don’t have to have some incredible body, because you’re naturally beautiful.” 

There are also risks in conveying that any doll exemplifies the “real” standard of beauty. 

McDowell said marketing a doll that has typically “white” features may dangerously normalize the appearance of American women of European descent, and thus alienate a number of other populations of class and race.

“If you’re a young girl of color, and you see that your 19-year-old big sister doesn’t look like [the standard], and her nose isn’t shaped like that … what kind of message does that give you as a little girl?” she asked.

McDowell added that projects like Lamm’s can also productively start a dialogue about how standards of beauty become routine. 

“It’s something that will get people talking about body image and parents talking to their children who are interested in those toys,” she said.