I love VIP Pets - Nyla

A little change of pace, as usually I only really review dolls.
But the VIP pets have been out a while and their faces keep attracting my attention in stores.

however, their full retail price of between £7:99 and £9:99 I think is a bit too much, so i've passed on them on multiple occassions thinking "what would I do with one anyway?"

For those who have no clue what i'm on about, the VIP pets are a line of giant headed dog figures produced by a company called IMC toys (who i've never heard of.) A look online reveals they're the company behind a lot of licensed "random tat", like the Monster High walkie talkies, the Barbie branded toy guitars and electronic diaries. Pens, watches, musical lockers, board games... basically all that "non doll" branded junk that finds it's way into TK Maxx on a regular basis.

Now the VIP pets are marketed as "hair play" toys, which explains the giant head and rooted hair.
I've never been one for hair play I have to admit, I couldn't even plait till I was in my 20s! I'm flat out useless with hair, it's just not my "thing". So the hair element of these dogs really isn't what attracted me.
Instead, it was the vibrant colours and their kinda cute faces.

They all use the same mould, but come in a wide variety of colours and styles. Some more fantastical than others (there's a purple one, a pink one but most of them are actually sort of beige.)

Each doll has a character and a mini bio that gives them some personality.
there's the party girl, the writer, the photographer, the pop star... and so on.
Some are uh.. more interesting than others.

So, wandering around the shops on Saturday we popped into the Entertainer and I happened to spot two of these toys on the shelf, marked down to £5 each.
With only two to chose from, my selection was pretty limited but for £5 I decided to take the plunge.
I picked out Nyla, the brown haired, brown skinned/furred dog with the funky beads.

Look at that adorable smiley doggy face!

The logo is cute too, with the head comb instead of the love heart. My only problem is I never know how you say this out loud. Is it "i love vip pets" or "i heart vip pets"? I have never had an adequate explanation for what the love heart symbol should be spoken as. Is it I heart fashion or I love fashion? Do I heart new york or love it? Arghhhh. 

Anyway, Nyla's bio tells me she's a bit of a hippy chick. She teaches yoga, she's into peace and love and the environment... and so on and so forth.

Mine's box has been a bit knocked about so her brush has come loose from the packaging. Oops?

The box itself is a nice little cube affair, half plastic half card with bright graphics on all sides.
the inside is made to look like a room, with lots of uh.. self portraits all over the walls. (do people do that? Seems frightfully vain to me)

The sides of the box feature a few "style ideas" I think. All of which seem to feature microbraids. thing is, i'm not convinced any of these looks is really achievable with the real thing.

they do look mighty cute though. I'm a bit of a sucker for beads.

The back of the box has a VIP card to cut out and keep. I have no idea what it's for, like.. at all.

Then we have a very brief bio in multiple languages. Nyla, the great yoga expert. She likes wearing exotic braids.
Which is interesting considering she comes with her hair completely unbraided.

there are then some nice instructions telling me how to actually braid hair. At least IMC doesn't expect all people to know how to plait, so thank you IMC for understanding my hair styling ineptitude.

It really is just "divide hair into three strands, take right one, put it over left..." and so on.

the box is AMAZINGLY simple to open. the top of the box is taped and just lifts open once you slice or pick off the tape. then the whole inner card slides out.

sorry about the flash.

Nyla herself is held into the box using just elastic bands. Yes.. JUST elastic bands. There's one around her body and one around her ears. It's fantastic, it took literally 2 seconds to debox her and left no damage, no holes, on frizz in her hair. THANK YOU IMC!

So here she is free. Look at that giant head!
Her body is teeny and ridiculous with a silly painted on shirt of some kind and a collar that's actually removable.

Her hair is lovely and soft, a huge plus for a hair play line. And it's lovely and curly without too much frizz. Another huge bonus.
Running a brush through it, it didn't fluff up like I expected, so I anticipate her hair would hold up to quite a lot of brushing, combing, plaiting and such.

Her body in all ridiculous glory. She has quite nicely sculpted haunches and a teeny bobbed tail. the body is totally static and somewhat shiny, but interestingly she doesn't seem prone to toppling over despite her massively top heavy design. The body is pretty solid while her head is hollow and light, so she sits really well.

Her hair does have a little dent in it from the tie holding her head in place. It was attached to her head with dreaded plastic tags, but those tags were stuck into existing holes.

She has two of these holes in each side of her head. I assume one set are for her earrings but the other set i'm not sure. Perhaps they hold the glasses in place on the pets who have specs?

While jamming earrings into the sides of her head doesn't seem the most realistic approach, the effect is fairly decent. Her hair covers the fact she's apparently pierced her cheeks so it looks ok.

Her earrings for the record, are simple bright yellow dangling triangles with moulded "dangles" at the ends.
they took a bit of force to jam into her head but they stay in there great.

Her headband on the other hand, isn't so great at staying put.
It has little comb pieces at each end which I assume are supposed to slide into her hair, but her hair just isn't thick enough to really give the combs purchase, and the comb parts teeth are too short and too closely spaced to really bite into the hair.

Maybe i'm just so inept with my hair abilities I can't work out how to use the combs haha.
Hey, it's a very real possibility.

Anyway, as she sits, Nyla's ginormous head, though cute, really felt off with her teeny body.
There's no denying she's a well made toy, but the chibi aesthetic kinda bugged me. Her large head combined with her large hair resulted in her looking mostly like a floating head with a shrivelled body jammed on the bottom.
Yuck.

Thankfully, along came blogger Dreamshelf dreamshelf.livejournal.com to light the way!

Inspired by her hybrid dolls, which were in turn inspired by Littlest Petshop/Blythe hybrids, I decided to see if I could jam this cute head onto a doll body and make my own wierd big headed anthro dolly. A friend to hang with my Catwalk kitties and Pinkie Coopers perhaps?

I happened to have a broken Ever After High body lying about. So I spent the evening fixing her leg (she'd lost her original one goodness knows where, so she got a CAM leg instead)

the skin tone match isn't perfect for head and body, but it's close enough.

I also had a go at braiding her hair like the instructions on her box suggested.
I learned through doing this that she actually doesn't come with nearly enough beads  to do her whole head. She comes with about 10 little beads, nowhere near enough for all that hair!

Her collar however doubles as a hair band (with actual elastic ties underneath of course.)

Her neck knob actually needed slight modification to fit the EAH body. I used a scalpel to carefully carve just a teeny bit more space to jam the EAH neck into.

But once on, even with the T hook broken (this body was seriously damaged ok?) she has a great range of motion. She can look up and down and side to side with no wobble or fear her head will just pop on off.

While her head is still MASSIVE, she feels more in keeping with the head to body ratio of say, the original Bratz (ok her head's a bit bigger than that, maybe Blythe or Pullip is a better comparison lol)
but the anthro looking face on the humanoid body just sort of works for me.

I love her yellow eyes with that bold aqua eye shadow, and her cute little smiley dog mouth. Her hair is lovely, it's so soft and a pretty auburn tone with a lovely soft curl. It's nice to run your hands through, and as a girl who's never much enjoyed playing with doll hair, this doll hair definitely inspires me to play with it.

the beads are fun but I wish there were more of them. her headband is darling and I love the yellow against her skin tone.

She could maybe do with some eyelashes, but i'm not sure.

Still, her face is so anthropormorphic with the hair and the eyebrows and the makeup, so being on a humanoid body just makes sense to me. She reminds me of the catwalk kitties (more so than the Pinkie Cooper dolls strangely) in that merging of human and animal features.

  

This one of mine is on a Monster High body. 

While the Catwalk kitties had smaller heads, they have the same cute little animal smiley mouth, eyebrows and makeup along with the rooted hair and big cartoony eyes. 

The VIP pets have substantially better hair though. And come with some SUPER cute accessories.

Nyla came with her earrings and her headband, but there's several who have glasses, and even one with headphones. 

Each little pet has a unique style expressed purely with hair style and these small accessories, which I have to say, is quite a feat. 

They have no clothing, just painted on "shirts" and collars. So it's down to their hair styles, colours and such to convey a lot of character.

If I can find a few more for £5, and some more bodies to put them on, I have to say, I wouldn't mind getting a couple of the others. They are cute and while i'm no great fan of their little shrivelled doggy bodies, I really do like their heads. 

I can see these being amazing for hybrids of many sizes and i'm half tempted to dig out some more bodies and see what Nyla looks like on each. 

All in all, the VIP pets are I think worth a look. If you're into chibi animal toys with brushable hair, these are perfect for that. If you're looking for an interesting head to use for an anthro hybrid they work great for a strangely large headed doll.

They're fun and the potential for some interesting customisation is there. Which I always dig. 

I like Nyla, and I shall have to have a good look at the rest of the range to see if there's any others that catch my eye.

Oh dear... this could become a slippery slope.