Barbie Trailer Inspires #BarbieFootChallenge On TikTok. Here Are The Risks

Is there a Barbie queue to do the #BarbieFootChallenge now that this hashtag has been trending on TikTok? Well, it can be a Barbie, Barbie bad idea to try to re-enact without proper support what actress Margot Robbie did with her feet in the Barbie film trailer. After all, life in plastic may be fantastic, according to that Aqua song, “Barbie Girl.” But your feet and body are probably not made of plastic and could get injured in the process.

To see what this Barbie foot or feet thing is all about, let’s Margot to this trailer of the soon-to-be-released Barbie movie that’s gone viral:

As you can see, the trailer begins with the camera zooming in on Robbie’s feet. Her feet—and presumably Robbie along with them—walk several paces while wearing a pair of pink high heels equipped with pink pom-poms. The star of the Barbie movie then stops and steps out of the high heels to stand. But rather than allowing her heels to drop naturally to the floor, she keeps her heels suspended in the air while maintaining an unnatural high-heeled arch to her feet without the actual support of high-heel shoes. That’s what a real, plastic Barbie doll might do if you were to take off the doll’s shoes because unlike humans, such a doll would be, drum roll please, made out of plastic.

Anytime a movie trailer drops, it seemingly is only a matter of time before someone somewhere tries to re-create the trailer on social media. And, alas, a TikToker by the name of Shanna Scribner re-enacted the beginning of this Barbie trailer step-by-step in the following posted video:

That feet has already gotten over 200,000 views on TikTok. Like the Barbie trailer, this TikTok re-creation focused on da feet and not on da rest of the body. As a result, everything else about this Barbie pose was beyond the ken of anyone watching, so to speak. In other words, you couldn’t tell who or what may have been supporting either Robbie or Scribner while each maintained their feet-long poses.

It turns out Robbie didn’t exactly complete this feat bar-none. Robbie revealed during a Fandango interview that she was actually holding on to a bar while performing her Barbie feet pose, as seen in the following video from The Today show:

Holy, living the dream, Barbie! You mean not everything in the movies is actually real? Indeed, Robbie didn’t actually let all of her body weight rest on the balls of her feet and her toes. She also mentioned that she walked on to a strip of double sided tape on the floor so that her shoes wouldn’t move when she stepped out of them. Moreover, Robbie indicated that it took about eight takes to get it right.

Yeah, you may want to think twice about trying this whole feat without the benefit of a whole stage crew and proper support. First of all, trying to step out of high-heeled shoes in such a manner could leave your shoes flying in one direction and you in the other, especially if the floor is a bit slippery. This presumes that you don’t have strips of double-sided tape all over your apartment, condo or house floors, which could make it a bit difficult for your party guests to walk.

Secondly, just look at what can happen when you maintain a high-heeled position even while wearing high heels. A study published in 2015 in the Journal of Foot and Ankle Injuries found that the rate of high heel-related injuries nearly doubled in the United States from 2002 to 2012. The study tallied 123,355 emergency room visits for high-heel-related injuries during this time period. The next year, in 2016, BMJ Open published a systematic review that found that high-heeled shoe wearing was associated with hallux valgus, musculoskeletal pain and first-party injuries. In this case, “first-party injuries” didn’t mean specifically “come on Barbie let’s go party” injuries. Instead, it meant injuries suffered by the person wearing the high heels rather than injuries to bystanders, such as what happens when you kick someone in the groin while wearing a pair of high heels. Hallux valgus is when your great toe gets deformed in a medial direction. These studies did clump together different people wearing different types of high-heeled shoes under different circumstances for different lengths of time. So just because you wear any type of high-heeled shoes doesn’t necessarily mean that you will suffer problems. Different types of high-heeled shoes may offer different levels of support.

Of course, no high-heeled shoes at all will offer no support when you try to maintain the #BarbieFootChallenge position in bare feet. That unnatural pose would put the entire force of your body on the balls of your feet and your toes. Now, you don’t really have balls—in your feet, that is. Rather, these so-called balls are actually the metatarsophalangeal joints that connect the metatarsal bones with the proximal phalangeal bones of your feet. Each of your toes really starts with a proximal phalange, which is connected to a middle phalange, and then ends with a distal phalange. The #BarbieFootChallenge pose, especially if done for or over extended periods of times, could lead to injury and damage to your metatarsals, your MTP joints, your phalanges or the joints connecting your phalanges.

The potential problems with the #BarbieFootChallenge position don’t end with such agony of the feet. This pose leaves your ankles hanging in the air without support as well. That leaves your ankles very susceptible to rolling in different directions, which may lead to different types of sprains and other injuries such as fractures to your ankles.

What you do to your feet and ankles can get back to your back, too, because everything is connected. A 2017 publication in the journal Gait & Posture showed that wearing high heels can not only be a pain in the backside, it can be a pain in the back. It indicated that up to 58% of women who regularly walk in high heels complain about low back pain. The publication also described a study in which a total of 40 women were filmed while walking barefoot and in low- (4 cm) and high-heeled (10 cm) shoes. The study found that the height of the heels did indeed affect the motion of the women’s pelvises and spines and curvatures of their spines during walking. That, in turn, could put different types of strains on their backs, even with the support of high-heeled shoes. Again, imagine what standing or walking for a while in a high-heeled position without the support of high-heeled shoes could do.

So, Ken you see all of the potential problems with blindly following the Barbie Foot or Feet Challenge? Add this challenge to the list of things about Barbie that just aren’t that real. And to the list of things on TikTok that may not be real as well.