Cross-posted at ParentingWithCancer.com.
When we got our Wii, I was bald. So when my kids drew my “Mii,” my Wii avatar, they tossed aside the idea of making her bald like me, instead choosing a super short hair style.
“At least your Mii can have hair now,” my son Nicholas, then 10, explained as he drew hair on a cartoon character he’d named “Mom.”
I was instantly jealous of my Mii.
In the months that followed, Nick added hair to my Mii as my mine grew back in, making it black and curly when my real hair went in that direction for a while, before settling on its current light brown, straight style. I do believe he found all that drawing somehow comforting.
Enter Bald Barbie. Well, enter if Mattel would make one. It seems that two moms, one bald from leukemia and the other from lymphoma treatments, have started a Facebook campaign to urge the doll’s makers to sell a bald Barbie.
More than 120,000 people have “liked” the page, including me, even though I’m pretty sure you can make your own Bald Barbie with two swipes of a sharp razor.
Personally, I don’t care so much if the doll is made as much as it brings attention to cancer and money to cancer causes. But it just might be what girls who’ve lost their hair to cancer need. That, and Miis with a Jennifer Aniston ‘do.
Mattel told CBS News that they don’t accept ideas from outside sources, which makes me wonder what their marketing department has under their Polo shirts and khakis after they came up with the Tattooed Barbie last fall. (Note to self: Ask Mattel for Radiation Tattoo Barbie.)
Anyhow, does your kid’s Barbie really need to go bald? Or is there enough of that around your house these days? As for us, my boys never wanted a Barbie, bald or not.
