My 7-year-old wants to know if she has an oval face. Why? Because “oval faces can often have almost any style haircut because almost everything looks great on this face shape!” Her sudden concern with her hairstyle “looking great” comes courtesy of her new Lego Club Magazine, which included “Emma’s Beauty Tips” in the March-April 2015 Lego Club Magazine.
She is 7. My little girl, the shape of her face, and whether her haircut is flattering are none of Lego’s concern. It wasn’t even her concern until a toy magazine told her to start worrying about it.
I had come down (barely) on Lego’s side in its quest to sell girls the glammed-up Lego Friends line, full of bricked-out beauty salons and pool parties and horse stables. But now this?
Lego Friends, according to the Lego website, is meant for children ages 5 to 12. Children far too young to be told by the oval-faced (of course) Lego “Friend” Emma that little girls with square faces need a haircut to “soften the edges of your face” while the unfortunate long-faced girls — remember, ages 5 to 12 — can get a haircut to “help your face appear slightly shorter.”
I checked. In this issue, at least, there’s no advice to help a traditional Lego minifig choose the right plastic hair to emphasize or soften the manly jawline on his or her yellow-cylinder-shaped head.
The ultra-girly Lego Friends line caused a flap from the beginning, and I wasn’t at all sure whether I liked it. Why can’t girls and boys both play with traditional Legos? When I was little, Lego used to even market them to all children, magnificently so, as illustrated by this 1981 ad.
But my daughter, who had regarded her brother’s Lego with only intermittent interest, greeted the candy-bright Lego Friends like the appearance of a choir of heavenly angels. She loved the minifigure animals. She loved the stories and characters. She loved the pretend-play possibilities of having a Lego ice cream parlor or a Lego house. As much as I prefer the whole image in the gender-neutral 1981 Lego ad, I was glad she was building, and I was glad she was stretching her imagination, even when she was snapping together Lego pieces that were overwhelmingly pink and purple. I gave Lego credit. Perhaps the company believed it had to go sparkly to compete with today’s gender-specific toys and get girls interested in building. For my daughter, it worked.
But then came the “Beauty Tips,” Lego’s clunky, insulting approximation of what it means to appeal to girls.
Perhaps naïvely, I had placed a certain amount of trust in Lego and its apparently good intentions, but I draw the line when even a construction toy company feeds my daughter that tired, toxic script of “start fixing your appearance, and now.”
I gave Lego the benefit of the doubt, but now all I’m left with is doubt — doubt whether Lego has my daughter’s best interests in mind, and doubt whether we’ll be buying any more Lego Friends.