By her side sits sidekick Olga "Dominika" Oleynik, one of Lukyanova's several doll-like apostles. She is seated in the back of the restaurant in her classic pose, preternaturally upright, head cocked.
Was she real-in the sense of existing in the three-dimensional world-or a Photoshop experiment run amok? Like everyone, I was staring too hard at her image on-screen to actually listen. Most of the Amatue videos were intended to be some sort of transcendental self-help lectures. She preferred to call herself Amatue, a name she claimed had appeared to her in a dream. Valeria wasn't in on the Barbie branding.
However odd her own view of perfection, she appeared to have achieved it. Still, where others had dabbled, she went for broke. The Western media were quick to dub her the "Human Barbie," but Valeria was hardly the first Homo sapiens to willingly make herself look like a doll-she wasn't even the first to earn the moniker: Some tabloid-damaged Brit laid claim to it a few years back.
A barbie doll skin#
Her improbable looks-the Margaret Keane peepers, the head quizzically cocked like a sunflower too heavy for its stem, the plasticky skin and wasp waist-reached the West when her self-shot home videos began drawing gawkers to YouTube. You would know that meeting Valeria Lukyanova is the closest you will come to an alien encounter. If you saw the pictures I saw, you would understand. Imagine a blind date, with all the attendant "Does she look like her picture?" jitters, multiplied by the queasy fear that she does look like her picture. Per Barbie's instructions, I enter Kamasutra, a brightly lit Ukrainian version of an Indian restaurant.