Barbie's pink paint shortage just got debunked... but there's a sublime twist
Dec. 1, 2023The Barbie movie’s production designer wants to set the record straight on that infamous pink paint rumor
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Remember when theBarbiemoviecaused a world shortage of pink paint? Yeah, well, it looks like that never actually happened, but rather the world simply didn’t have enough pink paint to begin with.
“There wasn’t enough pink paint [to begin with],” production designer Sarah Greenwood toldYahoo! Entertainment, acknowledging it was her off-the-cuff comment “The world ran out of pink,” made in an interview withArchitectural Digest, that led us all to believe that the Barbie movie caused a worldwide shortage of pink.
“Yes, we found this color after lots of investigation into the perfect pink. So we go to Rosco, this amazing film company that makes this beautiful pigment … but of course, nobody was using pink until we came along.” Greenwood explains, “And so, therefore, there wasn’t enough pink paint. We said, ‘Oh, we want 200 liters of your pure pigment.’”
So it looks like Barbie didn’t cause a shortage, but definitely put the paint companies to work. Set decorator Katie Spencer chimes in, “Nobody’s ever asked for that. So it was quite funny. Then you had Warner Bros. executives calling the executives of paint companies, saying, ‘We need pink paint.’” The decorator details how, in the end, everyone pulled together and found the perfect shades of pink, before concluding, “But no, we didn’t cause the world to run out of pink paint. There wasn’t enough in the first place.”
Greenwood and Spencer knew right away that the Barbie set had to be perfect, from the three-story Dreamhouse to the hand-crafted beach, even the sky and mountain view behind Barbie’s Dreamhouse is actually a hand-painted backdrop. Not only was the set perfectly pink-ified, but lead Margot Robbie brought in a dress code for all of the cast and crew and actuallyenforced a weekly pink dayon the Barbie set.
A lot of hard work went into creating Barbieland, and if there’s one thing we can take away from this it’s that the world needs more pink!
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