Quarantine Barbies: Grandma’s Realistic Take On Beauty Is Going Viral On Instagram

A California grandmother is making most of the quarantine by transforming Barbies to look like real people, to bust the age-old unrealistic beauty standards.

Tonya Ruiz, 56, under the Grandma Gets Real (@grandmagetsreal) account on Instagram, started to post Barbie parodies with accents depicting various moods of people during the coronavirus quarantine, as a fun hobby that she enjoyed doing with her granddaughters.

Her fairly realistic take on Barbie won hearts and even got people asking if they were put up for sale or available on Amazon.

“So many people said – finally a Barbie I can relate to,” Ruiz told Good Morning America. “I love that because that has been my message for the years I spoke about body image. You can’t look like a Barbie. You’re a real woman.” Ruiz said she was not looking at making money off her creations, insisting they are just her “comedic commentary on the quarantine.”

Her first post was “Curvy Barbie in stretchy pants,” but she went on to make others at the urging of her followers and on the inspiration of her family. They started taking pictures of their creations with different props and put them up on Instagram. Soon, the account had a considerable following.

The new posts included binge-watch Barbie, bread baking Barbie, Zoom Ken and other hilarious representations of real people. Ruiz has even made a health care hero Barbie and a grocery store worker Barbie is underway.

Ruiz, a former motivational speaker on body image, said she used Barbies as props to portray unrealistic beauty standards. On retirement, she placed the dolls in her attic, where her granddaughters found them years later and asked if they could play with them.

Ruiz said she grew up with unrealistic beauty standards and didn’t want her granddaughters to toe her line. She took the girls to the store and encouraged them to pick Barbies that looked like realistic members of her family.

"I heard Mattel came up with a new line of Barbies that look more like real people so I wanted to find them," Ruiz told the publication. “I wanted to show my granddaughters Barbies are not just about the shoes, it’s more about real life and family and realistic things.”

Ruiz said she bought the Barbies from stores and collected the miniatures used in the parodies from thrift shops and garage sales.