Barbie coffins: movie mania comes to funerals with parlours offering hot pink and doll-lined caskets

If Aqua's 1997's Europop smash Barbie Girl taught us anything, it's that life in plastic can certainly be fantastic.

But why should the fun stop once you've shuffled off this mortal coil? Well, according to a handful of left-field funeral parlours around the world, it shouldn't, and in the wake of the release of the world-beating Barbie movie, a hot-pink death is now a real possibility too.

That includes at one funeral home in El Salvador, which is taking the Barbie craze to the next level and offering Barbie-lined pink coffins.

Owner Isaac Villegas said he had already offered the option of pink coffins before the July premiere of the Barbie movie, but the craze that swept Latin America convinced him to decorate the cloth linings of the coffins - which are also decorated with little white stars -with pictures of the doll.

The pink metal coffins are on sale at the Alpha and Omega Funeral Home in the city of Ahuachapan, near the border with Guatemala.

“I said ‘We have to jump on this trend,’” Villegas said of the coffins. He said “it has been a success” and the funeral home has already launched a promotional campaign around the Barbie boxes and has sold 10 of them.

That does not mean 10 people have actually been buried in them as many people in El Salvador buy a pre-paid package for future burial.

Villegas said that until a year ago, families had preferred traditional coffins in colours like brown, black, white or grey but, a year ago, he sold his first pink coffin to a family who wanted their very happy relative buried in a happier-coloured coffin.

Now he has no plans to turn back, though he still offers darker colours. “We are going to have more pink coffins, because people are asking for it,” he said.

Latin America jumped on Barbie mania with pink-coloured tacos and pastries, commercial planes bearing the Barbie logo, political ads, and even Barbie-themed protests, with the famous doll’s theme also taking a macabre tone.

In July, anti-government demonstrators dressed up two women in pink and put them in giant Barbie boxes in the main square of Lima, Peru’s capital, to protest President Dina Boluarte, under whose administration police have often clashed with protesters.

And in Mexico, a sister of one of Mexico’s 112,000 missing people began sewing doll outfits to make a “Searching Mother” Barbie, referring to the volunteers who fan out across Mexico’s dusty plains to search for gravesites that might contain their children’s remains.

Her creator, volunteer searcher Delia Quiroa, hopes to publicise the plight of mothers who have to carry out the searches and investigations police will not do.