Barbie: One Of Ryan Gosling's Body Parts Isn't Ken Doll-Accurate For A Good Reason

It's his hair. Not anything else — it's his hair.

According to an article in Allure by Kirbie Johnson, who also posted about the piece on Instagram, Ken's hair in the "Barbie" movie doesn't look like a typical Ken doll's hair for a reason. If you've ever come across a Ken doll in the wild, you might recall that they're usually brunette or a slightly sandier hue than the bleach-blonde look Ryan Gosling rocks in Greta Gerwig's movie. Johnson spoke to both Marie Larkin, Gosling's hairstylist, and Ivana Primorac, the movie's makeup and hair designer, and got to the bottom of this hair color mystery.

"I was at [Ryan's] house, and we're talking about what looks we were gonna do," Larkin told Johnson. "He said that he wanted to look like Robert Redford and he gave me some photos." Apparently, Gosling provided some photos of Redford from his starring role in "The Way We Were" rather than the darker hair he usually sported. Then, another challenge presented itself: Gosling doesn't love acting with wigs, worried that they'll put distance between him and his performances. "We got the wig process rolling in London, but he is not a big fan of wigs," Larkin said. "So one day he came in, and he said, 'I know, let's do this, let's bleach my hair.'

"I can't imagine him now looking like anything else," Primorac said of Gosling's look. "Robert Redford is such an iconic [actor], and he looks so handsome. I think, now, Robert Redford is not doll-like enough."

"It was all really driven by the incredible artist that Ryan is, pushing it and trying it with Marie and his team," she concluded.

As those who have seen "Barbie" know, Ken has a major journey throughout the movie, thanks to his discovery of a little concept called "the patriarchy." When Barbie (Margot Robbie) experiences a full-on existential crisis, developing anxiety and cellulite, Ken joins her on a journey to the real world, where he realizes that out there, men (and maybe also horses) run everything, in stark contrast to the matriarchal pink utopia that is Barbie Land. As Ken embraces toxic masculinity and transforms Barbie Land into "Kendom," a place that makes all Barbies into second-class citizens who want nothing more than to serve their Kens unlimited "brewski beers," his hair changes — and Larkin says the team thought about that too.

"Our thinking was the 'good' Ken would always have picture perfect hair and he would look like a plastic doll, so we groomed him [to look] uptight looking," Larkin told Johnson. "He looked like a conservative person from the '60s. We always tried to make that difference [between 'good' and 'bad' Ken] pronounced," says Larkin. "We wanted him to look a little boy band, a little rock and roll-ish."

According to Larkin, she wanted "bad Ken" to have visible roots and also hair that just generally wasn't treated as well; after using purple shampoo on his bleached hair for the start of filming, Gosling stopped, which made his bleached-blonde strands brassier for his character's descent into misogyny. If you watch "Barbie" carefully, though, you'll realize another character's arc is telegraphed through their hair.

If Barbie's hair, which starts the movie as a larger-than-life cloud of blonde perfection, seems like it shrinks as Barbie reckons with her own existence and seeks humanity and a departure from the eternally plastic, perfect life she lives in Barbie Land, it's because it does. As Primorac confirms, Robbie's Barbie's hair is completely manufactured at first, and then approaches something human.

"The hair deflates and becomes a more normal amount of hair," the designer told Johnson. "She suddenly has hair that's normal length, and the amount of hair goes back to human [levels]. That happens quite slowly. By the end when she goes into the doctor's office, she has a completely normal amount of hair."

Barbie concludes the movie by becoming a real girl — and even visiting her gynecologist — and as a result, she loses the fabulous hair that's more suited to a doll than a human. It's safe to say that, in Gerwig's film, even the smallest detail was considered... and it's clear that even the individual strands of hair adorning Robbie and Gosling's heads were carefully planned out to match the film's narrative.

"Barbie" is in theaters now.