Barbie's pink paint shortage just got debunked... but there's a sublime twist

Remember when the Barbie movie caused 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 told Yahoo! Entertainment, acknowledging it was her off-the-cuff comment “The world ran out of pink,” made in an interview with Architectural 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.’”

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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 actually enforced a weekly pink day on 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!

I'm the Junior Social Media Editor here at GamesRadar+, handling all of Total Film's social platforms. However, I also write, covering all things film and TV for the site's entertainment section. I joined GamesRadar+ in 2023 and have been here ever since. I previously worked in communications after graduating with an MA in journalism. In my spare time, you can find me binging horror movies or getting lost in a cosy little game on my Switch.