Valeria Lukyanova, the 28-year-old “real-life Barbie doll,” continues to transform herself into the rail thin, bleached out human replica of the classic Barbie doll, drawing criticisms over her dedication to portray herself after the iconic doll’s unrealistic body image.
Yahoo! Shine on Friday profiled the Ukrainian model, who is an educator at the School of Out-of-Body Travel and who describes her work as “an international school in which our instructors show students how to leave their physical body and travel in their spiritual body.”
Artist and researcher Nickolay Lamm, who published a piece called What Would Barbie Look Like as an Average Woman, said that Lukyanova is emblematic of what can happen when young girls internalize idealized proportions, like those of Barbie dolls.
“Young women who are healthy and fit, say ‘I need to lose some weight,’” Lamm said. “Who are they comparing themselves to? [Lukyanova] is so extreme that people think she's a crazy weirdo and don't look at the bigger, much more silent problem of young girls trying to achieve an impossible ideal.”
Lukyanova, who claims she has had no other plastic surgery other than breast implants, was the subject of a 2013 documentary film called Space Barbie, by Vice magazine, which profiled her life. The Human Barbie denies that she removed any ribs to make her waist smaller, and says she subsists on a liquid-only, vegetarian diet.
But her Barbie archetype body is not the only thing that makes Lukyanova bizarre. In true “Space Barbie” style, Lukyanova, who says her “spiritual name” is Amatue, told the Daily Beast in August that she started having out-of-body experiences as a child and can now regularly time travel and visit aliens from other civilizations using "light."
(When asked to explain the metaphysics behind using light as a mode of time transport, she was unable.)
Married for ten years, she refuses to acknowledge that her husband is “human.” At one time, Lukyanova appeared to have found her soul mate, another plastic-surgery junkie named Justin Jedlica, whom she met on a photo shoot in early 2013, but soured on him when he tattled on her multiple plastic surgeries.
Lukyanova’s ultimate goal? She told a reporter for the Independent: “In recent weeks I have not been hungry at all; I'm hoping it's the final stage before I can subsist on air and light alone.”
Good luck with that.
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