Barbie Used So Much Pink Paint That It Caused An Actual Shortage

If you were a Barbie girl in a Barbie world and needed a new paint job for your Dreamhouse, you'd have been out of luck while the "Barbie" movie was shooting, director Greta Gerwig revealed. Barbie, played in the film by Margot Robbie, lives in a verdant pink Dreamhouse, and the set design Gerwig and company employed for that portion of the movie reflects the character's idyllic point of view. But Gerwig is also a fastidious filmmaker whose handcrafted fuchsia vibes proved destabilizing to the global paint market.

Speaking to Architectural Digest, Gerwig said, "I wanted to capture what was so ridiculously fun about the Dreamhouses." A curated lifestyle is a large portion of the Barbie brand's appeal, and the perfectly popping pink is a core component of that curation, so Gerwig went all out on the paint job. She noted, "I wanted the pinks to be too bright, and everything to be almost too much." 

But lavishing her Barbie world with pink pigments caused a shortage of paint. "The world ran out of pink," she said with a laugh.

Greta Gerwig's heavy use of a few particular pink paints for the sets of "Barbie" caused an international shortage of the shade she favored, which was described as a "fluorescent shade of Rosco paint" by Architectural Digest.

Surprisingly, the official Barbie shade of pink is actually owned by Mattel, the maker of the popular doll. It's Pantone 219C, a vibrant, almost unrealistically bright gel pink. It's unlikely the world ran out of pink entirely, and it's more likely that Gerwig was referring to that shade or very similar shades in her comment. Paint company Rosco makes a variety of vibrant pink shades, including the Roscolux Supergel R343 Neon Pink, which is probably the closest to the official one. Mattel is involved with the film, which would have made getting the official shade easy. In any case, Gerwig narrowed down to 10 shades of pink when working with set design for "Barbie," as production designers Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer explained to IndieWire.

Despite the challenges involved, the massive amounts of paint were necessary to achieve Gerwig's desired artistic effect on the movie she worried would end her career. Nearly everything was hand painted to add a dimension of touch sensation. "Everything needed to be tactile, because toys are, above all, things you touch," she said.