Review: Impala x Barbie Lightspeed Inline Skates

On a warm Thursday evening, our neighborhood bike caravan—parents, kids, and three electric bikes—rolls into the weekly roller disco night. A friend skates toward us, eating a vegan ice cream Chipwich, as we lock up and get ready. My 8-year-old hops off the back of my bike and thrusts her foot out for me to help put her skates on. A DJ in a tie-dye tent blasts music from my childhood.

“Do you know who this is, sweetie?” I say as I lace up my daughter’s quads and pull the Impala Barbie skates out of my bike box. She shakes her head. “This is Daft Punk!”

In the trailer for the Barbie movie, directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, Barbie and Ken skate down the boardwalk wearing Barbie’s iconic neon yellow and hot-pink skates. To her slowly dawning horror, Barbie notices that everyone is staring and laughing at her. She’s wearing a visor! She’s so conspicuous!

Even though I don't look like Margot Robbie at all, I was expecting a similar reaction. However, I’d forgotten that tonight is Neon Night at the roller disco. We are, by far, the least conspicuous people here. Two women in neon onesies pass us, swing back around, and offer my kid a blinky light-up rubber duck on a stick. She smiles, says thank you, names him Wilmer, and skates off as fast as she can. No one even notices my hot-pink skates are here.

Photograph: Impala

The Impala Lightspeed skates are the exact same ones that you can see in the movie trailer. Impala was a natural pick for the movie collaboration; the Melbourne, Australia-based company specializes in beautiful, entry-level skates with a sweet retro appeal. I have to disclose here that both my daughter and I already owned Impala quads before these special-edition versions arrived. They’re fun and versatile for both rink and outdoor skating, but the boot on the quads is a little stiff and takes a while to break in.

The quads come in sizes as small as 1, which is what my 8-year-old wears. The Impala Lightspeed rollerblades, on the other hand, start in a size 5. You have to be pretty big—well, adult-sized, anyway—to wear these skates.

In fact, I don’t know any kid my daughter’s age or younger who plays with Barbies. When I pull the skates on, my daughter frowns. “I thought you didn’t even like Barbie,” she says. “It’s not that I don’t like Barbie,” I say, sweating. “I just don’t like what she represents.” There’s a lot competing for my kid’s interest, so she stops listening to me and rolls off again.

What does Barbie represent, anyway? When I was a kid growing up in the 1990s, Barbie was interesting and aspirational. She wasn’t a Cabbage Patch Kid or an American Girl doll, a big-headed baby where your only option was to role-play being a wife or a mother.

Barbie looked like a woman that you might conceivably become. A woman who had cool, exciting jobs like being an astronaut or a doctor. She was a role model, but she was also a terrible influence. Even though we prepared for our future roles as working women who drove convertibles and had romantic relationships, we also all waited for our legs to become disproportionately long and our breasts to become alarmingly torpedo-like. (Spoiler alert: This didn't happen for most of us.)

But the skates! While they look like a solid piece of plastic, and they feel pretty heavy in your hand, they fit true to size. Impala offers them in whole sizes. I wear a shoe size 7.5 and have pretty narrow feet, and I find the size 8 comfortable. Oddly enough, a friend who wears a shoe size 8.5 can also wear the skates in a size 8, so maybe the generous padding compensates. It's the Sisterhood of the Traveling Inline Skates.

Unlike the Impala quads, the plastic boot has two pieces that are hinged together. You can lace the boots up and then cinch the buckle down tightly to feel secure, without compromising your ability to flex your ankles. Over the course of a week, I find that I can skate for one- to two-hour sessions comfortably, without bruising my shins.

There’s one optional heel brake that you can install on one boot pretty easily with the two included Allen wrenches. It also comes with a straight alignment—all four wheels are on the ground—although you can switch to rockered, which is when only the middle two wheels are on the ground for faster turns, like a hockey skate.

The included 70-millimeter, 84a-durometer wheels are pretty round, without the faster beveled edges some skate wheels have. You can also swap them out for bigger wheels. The brake also feels hefty and substantial. The skates feel great while cruising around on asphalt. My ankles feel secure, and I can go as fast as I want to while still feeling stable when I hit a piece of gravel or a stray bark chip.

Neon colors and questionable branding aside, I am having a lot of fun. While I fully embraced the pandemic quad skate boom, quads are something I discovered later in life. Like playing with Barbie, inline skating was what everyone did in the 1990s, along with wearing a waist pack and not getting gay-married.

I love these skates, but unlike the kid that I was, my kid … doesn't really want, or need, to pretend to be Barbie. She doesn't care about my skates. She doesn't want to watch the movie. She doesn't need a campy film to escape into a fantasy neon world with a leggy blonde glamazon as her guide—she already lives this life. She's skating full-speed ahead with a blinky rubber duck in a sea of neon. I'm the one stuck in the past, role-playing at being a doll who doesn't really matter anymore, trying to keep up in my adults-only Barbie skates.

Oh, and if you also don’t need Barbie anymore, you can buy the Impala inlines in different colors for about $100 cheaper.