White Barbies Take Holiday, Leaving Parents Scrambling Mattel Ran Out Of Black Dolls In ‘94, And Adjusted Too Much

Thousands of parents are paying exorbitant prices for the much sought-after Happy Holidays Barbie this year, even though the dolls are available for the asking in stores across the country.

The problem is that only the black version can easily be found. And psychologists say even black girls seem to prefer the white version of the leggy doll in her billowy green gown.

“Right now we only have Afro-American Happy Holidays Barbie left,” said Jennifer Picard, a saleswoman at F.A.O. Schwarz in Boston. “We don’t have any Caucasian ones left.”

So many shoppers want the soldout white holiday Barbie that Mattel Inc. has started offering vouchers redeemable in April.

Offers for the white doll on the Internet are running up to $200. The retail price is in the mid-$30s.

Mattel Inc. refuses to give exact figures for the special edition doll, but toy store managers say that after making too few of the black dolls in 1994, Barbie’s manufacturer overcompensated this year.

“Last year Mattel produced holiday Barbies in a 90-10 split, with 10 percent of them black, and they ran out,” said Mike Coats, manager of a Kay-Bee Toys store in Dallas.

“So this year, they’ve made a 60-40 split, 40 percent of them black, and they’re not selling.”

A Mattel spokeswoman said they’ve tried to respond to demand.

“We produce so that you have the best movement of stock possible,” said company spokeswoman Karen Stewart. “We try to assess the market.”

Although the holiday dolls come in only white and black, Mattel makes about 90 different versions of Barbie every year. There’s American Indian Barbie, Japanese Barbie, Mexican Barbie and more.

The black dolls also are drawing complaints from buyers, who say they are too generic or too ethnic.

“Don’t try to paint a white doll brown. And as for the Afro-centric dolls, I don’t think most kids want that. They want to be like the other kids with American toys,” said psychologist Brenda Wade of San Francisco.

Wade and several other psychologists cite studies done from the 1960s to today, in which black girls still associate white dolls with beauty, purity and goodness.

“Our children are inundated with white dolls, so why would they want to be black? So why would they want a black doll?” asked New Jersey-based family psychologist Gwendolyn Goldsby Grant.

Grant, who writes an advice column for Essence magazine, said she gets a lot of letters from black parents who can’t get their children to prefer black dolls.

“In our society, dictionary definitions of good and bad tell us what it means to be black and white,” she said. “The color coding information has been imprinted by the time they’re 6 years old and it stays for life.”