My daughter’s first doll will be a Totally Stylin’ Tattoos Barbie
March 6, 2009 – 1:34 pmIn some families, when their kids first get a tattoo or body piercing, it creates quite the uproar. In other cultures, it’s a rite of passage.
From the Los Angeles Times via MediaPost:
At 50 years old, Barbie gets tattoos — and a megastore in China
Barbie turns 50 this month, and to shake off a midlife crisis she’s getting tattooed and opening the doors to her first megastore in China..
I did a little research on percentage of American’s with tattoos and it was higher than I expected. I’m surprised the LA Times article didn’t reference any statistics, because tattoos are becoming the norm.
Emerging from their often unsavoury reputation of the recent past, tattoos have gained increasing prominence in the past decade. Life magazine estimated in 1936 that 10 million Americans, or approximately 6% of the population had at least one tattoo. A Harris Poll, done in 2003, nearly triples those numbers and estimates that 16% of Americans now have one or more tattoos.
I haven’t validated all of the research numbers at the site referenced above, but it also references a Fall 2006 survey by the Pew Research Center:
Thirty-six percent of those ages 18 to 25, and 40 percent of those ages 26 to 40, have at least one tattoo.
In an article on microtrends, Newsweek states that about 1/3 of Americans between the ages of 25-29 now sports body ink, so the research above (which varies slightly by source) is pretty consistent: there are a lot of people with tattoos.
So, for people that are upset about this product, I’d like to understand why. I think it’s just Mattel getting with the times and I applaud them for taking a risk. If you don’t like the doll, don’t buy it.
I apologize for the 15 sec commercial preceding the video. It’s from the LA Times, not me.
