MAURICIO GALDI is the latest sculpted and surgically enhanced man to call himself a Human Ken Doll, and he’s earning popularity in his native Brazil for his resemblance to the perfect plastic dude.

    And while the 27-year-old claimed that he never gave himself the catchy title, he has no objections to capitalizing on it.

    The son of a film distributor and a housewife from a middle-class neighborhood of Brazil’s capital Sao Paulo, Mauricio said he envied girls growing up because it was socially acceptable for them to play with Barbie and Ken.

    “I saw them playing with dolls and I wanted to do the same, but I never did for fear of prejudice,” he said.

    Though he may have grown out of his desire to play with dolls as a young adult, he never lost his fascination with their flawless features.

    When he was 17, Mauricio enrolled in acting classes, and was upset to learn there that he wasn’t considered “beautiful.”

    To remedy that, he went under the knife, starting with a nose job and eventually having injections of polymethylmethacrylate, a filler.

    His resemblance to Barbie’s boyfriend has become uncannier as he has undergone a total of eight procedures, though Mauricio claimed it was the media who first called him a Human Ken Doll.

    “I never sought to be the Brazilian human Ken,” he said. “It was something that came to me, television sought to give me the title.”

    But he’s happy to accept it, and has been reveling in his newfound fame. Lately, he has been sharing links to articles written about him with his 21,000 Instagram followers, alongside his regularly posted glamorous headshots.

    Mauricio isn’t the first to earn the title, either. Before he earned fame, another young Brazilian man named Celso Santebanes gained notoriety for spending roughly US$47,000 on surgery to look like Barbie’s mate.

    Celso and Mauricio even had a public feud when Celso believed that Mauricio was trying to elbow his way into the Human Ken Doll market.

    After Mauricio declared that he was the “real” Human Ken Doll, Celso called him an opportunist and compared him to Michael Jackson, insinuating that Mauricio’s plastic surgery looked unnatural.

    The pair later came to an understanding before Celso passed away from leukemia at the age of 21 earlier this month.

    “The sorrow that’s in my heart right now is inexplicable,” Mauricio wrote online after Celso’s passing.

    Americans may be more familiar with the country’s own Human Ken Doll, 24-year-old Justin Jedlica. The New York native has famously undergone over 190 plastic surgeries to achieve his look, and recently appeared on the E! show Botched.(SD-Agencies)