They're bigger and they're not yellow - meet Lego's latest characters...

Along with YoYo’s, fuzzy felt and the Operation board game, Lego was part of playtime for most of us back in the day. But the days of stealing your brother’s Lego bricks and shoving them up your nose (just us?) are over as the 53 year old brand has brought out a range especially for girls. Gracing the cover of business magazine Bloomberg Weekly, the new female Lego girl figure is part of five main new girl figures which will be introduced in 2012, all which have different names, back stories and nationalities.

Researchers for the company found that girls aren’t massive fans of the traditional yellow faced ‘boy’ figurines so the girl versions are more ‘natural looking’ (as natural as 2-inch-tall plastic, non-blinking, continually-smiling toys can be) than their male counterparts and are painted in more neutral, pastel shades than the usual Lego primary colours.

In a statement Lego CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp said "We felt it was time to test assumptions that girls aren’t interested in building and to breathe fresh air into a toy category filled mostly with pre-fabricated play experiences for girls." while senior creative director Nanna Ulrich Gudum added "Unlike previous Lego toys for girls, Lego Friends, at its core, does not apologize for being a construction toy and delivers, for the first time, a building experience in the same scale as our classic offerings."

The toys have an element of ‘girl power’ about them, steering away from the usual beauty parlours and tea shops of the Barbie world and including an inventor’s workshop and veterinary clinic instead. Go Lego girls Go!