A Ukrainian woman who has been dubbed the 'human Barbie' because of her doll-like figure and face has attacked those who criticize her after she released 'spring photos' of herself on Facebook.
Valeria Lukyanova, who has gained popularity and notoriety because of the way she has sculpted her body, including a supposed 17 inch waist, put up photos of herself on her Facebook page last week in miniscule shorts and top with the words "Spring is late this year, but it has finally come. It has inspired me to do a photo shoot … How I love spring!"
Lukyanova has a million likes on her Facebook page and the response was divided between her fans and those who said she needed medical treatment or had photoshopped the images.
"It's sad that the majority of people instead of the path of development choose the path of degradation," wrote Lukyanova, 29, in response on her Facebook page, "If they see that a person has achieved more than them they are ready to literally tear them apart."
They have such negativity, she wrote, that it's as if "they have gone mad from spite and in an outburst of rage have poured out froth from their mouths all over the keyboard."
The photos show off a more muscular human barbie after months in the gym. Lukyanova also has a number of videos of herself doing impressive exercises on Facebook. She said that people were jealous of her physical form and that she had built up her muscles so that she can be like "the warrior Amazon girls. I'm inspired by Medusa, the queen of the Amazons. I think her body is ideal."
She wrote that she has been working out in response to the recent attack on her. In November last year, she said that she was attacked by two men who punched her and strangled her, the Daily Mail reported.
"I think, without exaggeration, that I can deal with a man if somebody has the courage to attack me again," she wrote on Facebook.
Pictures at the time showed her with her head bandaged and with bloody lips which she insisted was not as a result of plastic surgery. She has repeatedly denied having any surgery apart from breast enlargement.
Critics of Lukyanova have long claimed that she uses Photoshop, although journalists from The Independent and GQ who met her in 2013 and 2014 wrote that she does look pretty much exactly as she does in photos. She admitted though in an e-mail to Cosmopolitan that she did change the photos this time.
"The pictures are photoshopped to achieve smoothness and color correction. The pictures were taken in the botanical garden on the phone. They were not high quality. I had to edit them in order to correct the defects of the phone picture," she said in e-mailed comments to Cosmopolitan.
