Part of what I'm seeing is an optical effect brought about by makeup there is essentially an eye drawn around each eye , but even after I make the mental correction for it, Valeria's eyes remain chillingly large. The Internet rumor mill claims she has had her eyelids trimmed to achieve this look, which seems unlikely and sounds nightmarish. Evolution has taught us to think of big eyes as beautiful—it's a so-called neotenous feature, implying youth—but tweak that delicate scale just a little and you've got a wraith, or an insect.
A living Barbie is automatically an Uncanny Valley Girl. Her beauty, though I hesitate to use the term, is pitched at the exact precipice where the male gaze curdles in on itself. Her features are the features we men playfully ascribe to ideal women; it's how we draw them in manga and comics and video games. Except we don't expect them to comply with this oppressive fantasy so fully.
As a result, she almost throws our idea of a supervixen back in our face. For a while, I just look, which would normally be rude. Here, though, the act of looking feels like an experiment conducted on me. Am I supposed to be attracted, to be repulsed, or to ponder the sexism of that dichotomy? Compared with Valeria, Olga is just a human in a lot of makeup, no more or less augmented than any Miami Beach body, wearing some sort of purple Power Ranger outfit self-designed, she later explains.
I instantly understand why Valeria insists on having her around. She seems to be there for scale, to subtly underscore Valeria's ethereality. We order food, in a manner of speaking. Kamasutra being an Indian restaurant, there are the usual three chutneys on the table—mint, tamarind, and chile. Valeria gets a carrot juice, then proceeds to upend all three chutneys into it, swirl the result with her straw, and drink.
This gag-inducing mix, she explains, is her dinner; she is on an all-liquid diet these days. I don't quite know where to go from there, so I ask about her nails, which feature a complicated pointillist design of pink, lavender, and turquoise. It came to me in a dream. When seated across the table from a living Barbie and stuck for topics, by all means go for collegiate bullshit.
American, even. Valeria grows pensive, which in her case means rolling her eyes slightly upward without changing anything else about her face. Everyone wants a slim figure. Everyone gets breasts done. Everyone fixes up their face if it's not ideal, you know?
Everyone strives for the golden mean. It's global now. If I had a glass of multi-chutney carrot-juice mix before me, I'd do a bright orange spit take.
She goes and files it down a little, and it's all good. Ethnicities are mixing now, so there's degeneration, and it didn't used to be like that.
Remember how many beautiful women there were in the s and s, without any surgery? And now, thanks to degeneration, we have this.
I love the Nordic image myself. I realize that just like everyone reading about Human Barbie, I had had a simple narrative prepared in my head: A small-town girl grows up obsessed with dolls, etc. Instead, I get a racist space alien.
Valeria innocently daubs her face with powder. The future Barbie was born nowhere near Malibu. Valeria hails from Tiraspol, a gloomy city in Europe's poorest country, Moldova. Valeria remembers both her Siberian-born grandfather and her father as very strict and began to rebel at the usual age of Stage one involved dyeing her hair, which is naturally a low-key shade of brown.
Valeria went for the goth look first—about the farthest you could get from Barbie. She wore all-black clothes to accentuate her very white skin.
Kids at school began to tease her. Look, a witch! At 15, traumatized by the name-calling, she doubled down: bracelets with sharp two-inch spikes, artificial fangs. She was dismissed from a school choir for standing bolt upright when the singers were instructed to sway; in different circumstances, this budding nonconformism could have brought her straight into Pussy Riot.
Instead, she began modeling, small-time stuff, and learned to apply makeup and hair dye in increasingly theatrical ways. Valeria was less interested in attracting men than in repelling them: "A dude would try to talk to me on the street and I'd be like" she switches to a raspy basso" 'Oh, honey, aren't I glad I had that operation. Whatever ideas of beauty and identity she had had before, Odessa would warp further. The city fizzes with sex, but not in the fun way of, say, Barcelona or even Moscow.
Sex is an industry here, and sometimes, amid the scuffed nineteenth-century splendor of its seaside boulevards, it feels like the only industry left. In response, Lukyanova has posted videos online — some without makeup — and appeared in several interviews. She has stated that her appearance is mostly natural, and she does not believe that she resembles Barbie.
She claims that other than her body and hair color, her looks have not changed much at all since her teenage years. In part, Lukyanova chalks up her appearance to the fact that she does not smoke or drink. In fact, at one point she went so far as to attempt surviving solely on water and air.
Of course, just about anyone that has paid any attention to her story is skeptical, including many plastic surgeons. Surgeons have pointed out several areas of her face and body that have likely been altered. While the appearance of her eyes is largely due to her complex makeup routine, other areas are questionable. The narrow bridge dorsum of her nose is particularly suspect.
A nose appears natural when it is in harmony with other facial features such as the lips, cheeks, and chin. In all likelihood, a plastic surgeon created this look by removing or shaving the cartilage of her septum and possibly even raising the nasal bridge by adding a nose graft. In addition, her waist looks like it has been altered through body contouring.
The only procedure she has admitted to is breast augmentation. People decide to have plastic surgery for many reasons. Some desire a change in the contours of certain facial features or body parts, while others want to rid themselves of excess fat. The only difference is that now I am more fit. Ms Lukyanova claims everything - apart from her boobs - is percent natural, and a result of a good diet involving small amounts of raw fish and fresh fruit juice, and a gruelling fitness routine.
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