A new mum has come up with a genius way of teaching her daughter healthy body standards.
Kate Claxton has painted post-pregnancy stretch marks on her daughter's Barbie doll to show her they're "perfectly normal".
After giving birth over three years ago, Ms Claxton suffered with horrendous post-natal anxiety and hated the marks left on her skin.
But now with her daughter at the age of three, the 35-year-old children's author has taken steps to normalise imperfections and marks on women's bodies as much as possible.
Kate, from Swindon, Wiltshire, used nail polish to paint the thin, jagged lines on her daughter's doll's tummy and hips to show her the marks are completely normal.
"My daughter has really started getting into Barbies recently and I almost recoiled when I bought her first one," said the mum.
"It was typically Barbie-like - perfectly proportioned, long legs, blonde hair. We've since brought other versions with vitiligo, prosthetic legs and fuller figures.
"So to their credit, they do more inclusive dolls but I could not find one anywhere with stretchmarks."
Kate is now urging manufacturers Mattel to bring out a stretchmark Barbie to normalise the marks, which commonly occur in puberty as well as pregnancy.
With Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie set to hit the big screens later this month, fans of the franchise have also seen more representative versions of the doll brought out in recent years, including a Barbie with Down's Syndrome released earlier this year.
Ms Claxton, who has written children's book My Mum's A Tiger about a girl whose mum has the marks, added: "I have written a children's book about stretchmarks and when I came to research it I found 96 per cent of women have them."
"But there aren't any dolls representing how normal this is, so I thought I would do one myself. When you look up stretchmarks it's all about creams and treatments to get rid of them and I found little evidence of people embracing them.
"And that's what I think mums need to do, accept they are perfectly normal and let their children know the same. Women are more likely to end up with stretchmarks than have blonde hair so I think it's about time Barbie got on board and made a doll to represent this.
"Children should know stretchmarks are natural for mummies, and any other women for that matter, to have. There are many ways for people to be 'normal' and I believe kids should learn that from a young age. I didn't want to pass my body hang-ups onto my daughter.
"I would love the manufacturers to make some Barbies with stretch marks to spread the message that they are nothing to worry about. I just believe it's really important to expose our children to as much diversity as possible."
Kate lives with husband Tony, 36, and says that as a teen, she suffered with her own body image. Despite hating her post-pregnancy marks at first, she's now grown to accept and love them.
"I just used nail varnish to achieve the effect, I didn't use one of my daughter's current dolls, as it's now too toxic to play with. But I had a conversation with her about what they were.
"We decided to get the doll changed and she didn't mention the stretchmarks. So hopefully they are already something completely normal to her and she won't worry about them as she gets older and that's what I wanted to achieve.
"She knows mummy has got stretch marks, and they're not a big deal."
