The eyes, the staring eyes, are the scariest. Her mouth, like in a cheap cartoon, is the only part of her that moves. "Hello," she says in Russian, remaining perfectly still. There might be some Loretta Lux-style postproduction to her photos, sure, but it's not crucial. In the flesh-the little of it that she hasn't whittled away with what she says is exercise and diet-Valeria looks almost exactly like Barbie. A one-eyed smiling-skull pin perches on her sky blue top, pushed to the side by the veritable shelf of silicone around which her whole body seems arranged. She's holding a handbag shaped like a lantern. Her mouth is frozen in a vacant half-smile the teeth are small and almost translucent. Her brand-new hair extensions, the color of Chardonnay, hang straight down, reaching her nonexistent hips.
I walk through the restaurant, which is vaguely porny, like everything else in Odessa, and Barbie gets closer and realer with every step. 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.
BARBIE THE EXPLORER 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.
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