DIABETIC BARBIE; "hundreds of thousands of children have Type 1 diabetes"
- Jul 13, 2025
- 3 min read
July 9, 2025, KSL, Salt Lake: Hundreds of thousands of children have Type 1 diabetes. Now, there's a Barbie who has it, too
The latest Barbie slays in a chic blue polka-dot crop top, ruffled miniskirt, chunky heels and an insulin pump. She is the brand's first doll with Type 1 diabetes.
Dollmaker Mattel worked with Breakthrough T1D, formerly known as the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, to design the doll, which aims to represent the roughly 304,000 kids and teens living with Type 1 diabetes in the United States.
The doll was launched on Tuesday at the Breakthrough T1D Children's Congress, a three-day event in Washington that brings together kids and teens living with the condition to meet with lawmakers. This year, the group is asking Congress to renew funding for the Special Diabetes Program, which was first allocated by Congress in 1997. The program's current funding ends after September.
The advocacy efforts have taken on new urgency this year. With so many deep cuts to federally funded projects in recent months, Breakthrough T1D said it's anxiously watching to see if this funding will be reupped.. . .
Type 1 diabetes is typically diagnosed in childhood, but it can be diagnosed in anyone at any age. It differs from Type 2 diabetes, in which people are still able to make insulin but their cells stop responding to it.
In addition to the insulin pump that attaches to the new Barbie's waist, the chestnut-haired beauty has a continuous glucose monitor on her arm – a button held on by a strip of heart-shaped Barbie-pink tape. Her cell phone displays an app that shows her glucose readings.
She also has a light blue purse to hold her supplies and snacks to help her manage her blood sugar throughout the day. It matches her shoes, of course.
Emily Mazreku, director of marketing and communications at Breakthrough T1D, lives with Type 1 diabetes and worked with Mattel to design the doll. Barbie's phone app displays a snapshot of her actual blood sugar readings from one day during the design process.
Barbie's blood glucose reading is 130 milligrams of sugar per deciliter of blood, which is in the normal range. Most people with diabetes try to keep their blood sugar between 70 and 180 mg/dl. Her continuous glucose monitor has a graph that shows the highs and lows that can happen during the day. The blue polka dots are nods to the colors and symbols for diabetes awareness.
Mazreku spent almost two years conducting focus groups to gather feedback on the doll's features and ensure it accurately represented the entire Type 1 diabetes community.
"Mattel approached us, and they wanted this to be a part of their Fashionista line," Mazreku said. "And we jumped on that opportunity right away."
We know that increasing the number of people who can see themselves in Barbie continues to resonate.–Devin Duff, Mattel
The line features dolls with more than 175 different looks, including a variety of skin tones, eye colors and hair styles. It includes a Barbie with behind-the-ear hearing aids, a blind doll who uses a cane and another with a prosthetic leg. There's also a doll with vitiligo, a condition in which skin loses its pigment and becomes splotchy. . . .
The company said the blind Barbie and a doll with Down syndrome were among the most popular Fashionista dolls globally in 2024.
The company launched its first doll with a disability — a friend for Barbie called Share-a-smile Becky, who used a wheelchair — in 1997. Customers noted at the time that Becky's wheelchair couldn't fit through the doors of the Barbie Dream House, a situation many people with disabilities encounter in real life.
That insight is part of the value of having kids play with dolls that have disabilities, said Dr. Sian Jones, co-founder of the Toy Box Diversity Lab at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Jones and her colleague, Dr. Clare Uytman, study how playing with dolls and toys with a range of physical challenges can reduce systemic inequality for disabled people. . . .
Between abortion worldwide (infant sacrifice in modern form), vaccines, psychiatric hospitals getting away with extreme abuse and human rights violations especially with autistics, the betrayal and rights denial by so called "psych rights" NGOs for autistics who were violently restrained/tortured due to SIBD and/or aggression, etc, we are under God's judgement. All of these things will only get worst until Yahuah (Jesus is God himself) returns and kills Satan and all Satan's servants.