Barbie, Venus, and other naked toys

What toys can nudists collect?

When the Barbie movie became a phenomenon last year, I was inspired to buy my first Barbie doll.

I’ve always loved toys and am a little embarrassed by how much money I spend on them, but usually I buy Godzilla action figures or other kaiju, never dolls. But I loved the movie and the “This Barbie…” meme that accompanied it. I was thinking about what kind of Barbie I would be. Probably a dancer or something, but also naked.

Barbie can be anything, of course—even a nudist—but Mattel has never straight-up sold naked Barbies, have they? I don’t think so.

I found a new Barbie that best suited my tastes: pink hair and a floral print dress, plus a purple prosthetic leg as a bonus. I loved the dress a little too much to make her a proper naked Barbie, and I was also surprised to see that the newer dolls actually have underwear molded onto their bodies! So she could never be truly naked! Which is fine; she’s still a cool doll, and she’s currently happily being cradled in the arms of one of my numerous Godzilla toys.

But I still wanted a naked Barbie to better represent myself.

Toy hunting

I started going to antique and resale shops in search of older Barbies from before they started molding the underwear onto them. I found one, and she now sits with my small nudist library on a bookshelf in my office. It took longer than I expected to find her, in part because I kept finding mostly newer dolls or knockoffs, and bafflingly came across nude dolls that had underwear or swimsuits painted onto them with nail polish. I didn’t know this was a thing, but apparently it’s a common practice for the sake of…maintaining a doll’s modesty I guess? To protect children from seeing anything obscene? When these dolls don’t even have nipples or genitalia?

There is something to be said about the sight of a naked Barbie when you’re a little kid with no real idea of what an adult human body looks like. I remember seeing girls playing with Barbies when I was young and wanting to see under their clothes, and I also remember feeling really weird when I did finally glimpse a naked Barbie in person in someone’s bedroom, a feeling I had no way of articulating.

I think it’s similar with naked baby dolls too, like when you see the clenched bottom of a Cabbage Patch Kid.

But even now that I had a naked Barbie, it still didn’t feel right. This doll wasn’t MEANT to be nude. None of them are. Do they make intentionally nude toys? More specifically, are there intentionally nude toys that aren’t, well, for adult purposes? Something that’s not like a statue or figurine?

Birth of Venus

My answer came when Figma announced a toy of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus as part of their Table Museum line in the fall of 2022. I think I first saw her on Twitter, and I fell in love…until I saw the price tag. I then promptly forgot about her until earlier this year, when I came back to thinking about naked toys. Luckily, I have a full-time job once again, paid off my credit card and had reward points, AND have recently done well at some art markets, so I looked her up again and saw that she’s still expensive, but I went for it anyway. I mean, come on, a classical nude painting in action figure form is hard to pass up, you know?

I have no regrets; I think she’s one of the finest action figures I’ve ever bought, a work of art in her own right. The colors are fantastic; she comes with five extra sets of hands to make different gestures, and she’s incredibly poseable. I’m kind of blown away by how accurate her sculpt is to the actual painting, even if that limits the range of motion in her legs, and her torso is always bent at a specific angle. The clear base piece that attaches to her back lets you work with all kinds of dynamic poses, including floating poses, and is necessary given the slope of the clam shell she stands on, but on flat surfaces it isn’t really necessary. And I like that the painting frame is made up of smaller pieces so you could take it apart and give her a different backdrop if you wanted, though I admittedly just put that back in the box as I have nowhere else for it to go. It’d be fun to put a Power Ranger or other toy in its place, though.

I got curious and looked into what other Table Museum figures are available in the line, since now I feel like I need a nude male to go with her, and I was astonished by the available options. There’s Michaelangelo’s statue of David, a perfect example of Renaissance beauty. There’s also the Thinker, a good, solid choice, but…I think the one I’m most drawn to is Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. It is incredible and a little insane that they managed to make this figure with all eight limbs fully poseable. Is he as handsome as the other two? No. But who needs good looks when you have extra arms and legs! And unlike Venus, they all have visible genitalia!

There are fewer female nude options, I’m afraid to say: Venus de Milo is your only other choice, the skirt doesn’t seem to come off, but she DOES come with arms, more than the actual sculpture can claim. You can also get some baby angels if you’d like.

There are plenty of other cool clothed options like The Mona Lisa or Edvard Munch’s The Scream, but that’s not what we’re here for at Planet Nude.

As an aside, I do feel like there could be a real market for toys and dolls aimed towards nudists, which would be able to avoid the more adult nature of anatomically accurate nude toys currently available (seriously, don’t search nude toys on Etsy). Educational toys for children would be great too!

Did you play with any toys that you’d undress as a kid? Was it formative to you and to your development as a nudist? What kind of nudist toys would you like to see? 🪐