Move over Barbie. There’s a new doll on the market out to shatter what it means to be “beautiful.”Enter Goldie, the girl inventor. She’s still a blonde, but at least she’s without impossible proportions. Dressed in girl-appropriate overalls and red “Chucks,” she comes with a hammer and a zip line instead of a Dream House. She’s not just a pretty doll—she’s an action figure.Goldie hails from none other than GoldieBlox. The hit toymaker went viral last year with an ad featuring girls building a Rube Goldberg machine made from toys, and they’re doing it again with the ad to announce this latest project.
RELATED: 9 Ways to Silence Your Inner CriticThe video starts with an ominous “Big Sister” who chants “You are beauty, and beauty is perfection” to an assembly line of girls dolled up in pink dresses and heels, each one grabbing a slim doll in a matching outfit from the conveyer belt. Finally, one girl, dressed in overalls and sneakers with messy hair, breaks out of line and smashes the “Big Sister” screen with a hammer.At that point, the machine spits out what else but the GoldieBlox Zipline Action Figure ($23; amazon.com).Until now, GoldieBlox has made a name for itself by creating toys that encourage girls to build and invent, like GoldieBlox and The Spinning Machine ($30; amazon.com) and GoldieBlox and The Builder’s Survival Kit ($60, amazon.com). The kits come with a booklet full of the character Goldie’s instructions as well as all the nuts and bolts for putting the project (be it a toy car or a movie machine) together. This is the first time girls will get to play with Goldie in 3-D while they build things.RELATED: Why Perfectionism Could Be Killing YouAccording to the toymaker’s web site, women make up only 14% of engineers worldwide, though, they’re working on boosting those numbers. Each project is designed to build girls’ spatial skills and confidence in problem solving. (Founder and CEO Debbie Sterling is a Stanford-educated mechanical engineer.)It’s refreshing to finally see toys that encourage girls to think of themselves as something other than a pretty princess or a flawless beauty with insatiable career goals.It’s even more exciting that the company seems to be doing well: GoldieBlox is poised to be big competition in the toy aisle this holiday season with Goldie and her kits now available at more than 1,000 retailers, including Toys R Us, reports Time.com.RELATED: 12 Ways We Sabotage Our Mental Health
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