Monster High G3 - Catty Noir

 She's finally here, months late but here at last. 

Let me explain.

See, Catty hit the US market back in like June? Meanwhile here in the UK her release date kept being pushed back... and back... and back. 

as it stands, as of today (September 16th) Smyths, the biggest toy retailer, STILL has no confirmed stock date for her. She's been on their site "awaiting stock" since July. 

But I managed to find a retailer who DID have her in stock at last. 

Not Argos, Not Smyths, not Amazon even. Not even Very. Nope, instead the company who got stock in first was Grattan/Freemans. Who are Grattan/Freemans I hear you ask? Grattan are a West Yorkshire based catalogue company who generally sell clothing, but have a small toy section.Freemans are their sister company following some sort of merger in 2000. Like Very/Woolworths/Littlewoods, the two companies operate near identical websites with the same stock and have the same admin and honestly I don't fully understand what the point of the multiple sites IS but whatever. 

 Not somewhere I would have thought to look. I only found this because of Google, and was honestly really surprised to see they had Monster High dolls at all, let alone having Catty in stock. 

Not only was she in stock, they had coupons which saved me some more money.

Whooo!

I ordered and waited about 4 or 5 days for delivery. Like Very, Grattan use Evri for their delivery and Evri is slow as shit. 

But she arrived! So let's get a look at this  new rendition of Catty Noir!

 

 

Catty's box is like the other doll boxes, nothing really exciting there. I still am not sure I appreciate the plastic monster high sign thingie, could it not be cardboard and recyclable? The first one was fun for my shelf, but I have loads of them now and I don't know what to do with them.  

 

The back of the box reuses the same graphic as the Core Refresh dolls. 

 

 

 

Catty's art is okay. I feel like her black skin is a big advantage here because I honestly don't like the way this artist shades. It leaves the characters looking simultaneously shiny/greasy but also in the case of Lagoona, sunburned to heck.  It makes me uncomfortable. Catty doesn't suffer so much of that because her darker colours I think help avoid the worst of the shiny swollen skin effect. She looks pretty decent honestly.

What I DO appreciate is the cohesive art style by using the same artist every time and that the art seems to be done late in the game so matches the actual doll release almost 1 for 1, unlike a lot of artwork on doll boxes. 

One thing I really like about G3 is how characterful the new faces are. Much as I love g1 Monster High, there's so much life in these g3 dolls and Catty is no exception. Of course, i'm a sucker for side glancing eyes too, I love them so much.

I can't remember if Catty had a pet in g1 lore, I don't think she did. Catty came out at a time where they were using any excuse to explain why characters didn't have pet figures any more. Amulette seems to be a whole new creation and while she continues the "everyone gets a kitten or puppy" ification of Monster High pets, I don't hate it. Is it weird for a cat to have a pet cat? A little bit, but Torelei had a pet saber tooth tiger so.... yeah. 

Amulette appears to be a hairless cat which is certainly an unusual choice. She wears a little pink boa and has white makeup across one eye. Did Catty paint on her cat? lol. 

Personally I feel like something that tied into the "bad luck" motif would have been cooler. Maybe a magpie? (One for sorrow) or something? I dunno.

Like all the other g3 dolls, Catty comes with an assortment of random stuff. 

Interestingly, she hasn't got any random food this time around. 

Instead she has a drink bottle, her phone, a mirror, a microphone, glasses and a booklet. 

Catty's hair is partially braided, but only around the front edge of her hair. I know a lot of people were annoyed by this, seeing it as a cost cutting measure which it probably was, to be fair. But I don't hate it because it adds some fun texture to her hair while keeping the rest of her hair still brushable. Would she look awesome with a full head of braids? heck yeah. But i'll take what I can get. 

I mean, I appreciate some braids vs no braids. I like the texture and visual interest they add to what would otherwise be a kinda boring hairstyle. 

Catty is deep black but she has this almost purplish undertone which is quite pretty. 

Her makeup is surprisingly simple with little grey/silver stars under each eye and bright pink eyes with little sparkles in them. 

She has painted baby hairs, a very subtle painted nose and her lipstick is gradiated so it's brighter in the middle. I'm sure there's a name for this style but I don't know it. 

She only has one earring, which is a strange choice. At first I thought this was a mistake but no, her other ear has no earring hole and her art clearly shows only one earring. Weird. It's a little studded heart hoop and it snags on her hair constantly. 

Alongside original Catty (not in her original dress) g3 Catty really stands out. Not just because she's significantly larger but she's just brighter in all ways. Her skintone isn't as matte black as g1, her hair is a brighter pink and her clothing is far more vividly pink. 

An interesting change is that g3 no longer has the pale pink nose and ear inners. Now her nose is very slightly pink but so close to her skintone you can barely see it and she has no painting on the inside of her ears. This feels more realistic for a black cat honestly. Black cats don't tend to have pink noses, they have black noses. Pink noses are more common for white cats. 

So it's time to address the elephant in the room. Catty's body shape. She's a BIG doll. And I don't mean just that she's curvy, she's also quite tall.

She practically dwarfs Draculaura. Height wise she's closer in height to Frankie, not quite the same height but a touch taller than the standard g3 body and smaller than Abbey.

Catty's tail is lovely, sculpted with a lovely curve and fur. It looks floofy. It's not removable, least, I couldn't remove it by tugging on it quite firmly.

Compared to the Barbie Curvy body, Catty feels aesthetically similar. Her hips and thighs are substantially thicker and her arms and shoulders narrower, but they look close to me. 

Curvy Barbie can fit Catty's dress absolutely fine. Though it is a bit short.

And Catty can wear Curvy Barbie's jumpsuit though the legs are far too long.

I imagine quite a few Curvy Barbie items may fit Catty, though sleeves and leg length is going to be an issue. 

Catty's outfit is quite straight forward with only four pieces making it up. A dress, a jacket thing, a belt and boots.

Her dress is nice, it's a shiny holographic foil print with shattered glass effects with a pink underskirt. Both pieces are made from slightly stretchy fabric and the pink material is quite pleasantly soft too. 

This dress also really reminds me of her g1 outfits. 

Do you see what I mean? 

Catty's jacket... thing... is a familiar design. Cleo has something similar for one of her skulltimate secrets dolls.

 

Unfortunately, unlike the Cleo one which is made from nice soft foil fabric, Catty's shrug is made of stiff plasticky crap that feels like a cheap rain slicker. 

It's very very unpleasant to touch. It's SO plasticky and crinkly and I hate it. 

I hate it so much. 

Why couldn't they make it out of decent fabric? It's not like they hadn't managed to get those puffed out bow sleeves using fabric previously. 

I fully expected Catty's jacket shrug thing to be a lot like Cleo's, because reusing the pattern but in a different fabric would make sense, but not only is Catty's garment a different and crappier material, it's also constructed completely differently (probably because of the fabric choice) 

It has velcro under each arm because the fabric has no stretch and is really difficult to get onto the doll without it. The puffy bits also don't drape over the doll's shoulders but instead stick up like wings. 

Honestly? I vastly prefer Cleo's bow shrug thing. It feels nicer and it looks nicer. 

Catty's piece just is too unpleasant for me to want to have anything to do with it. 

Into the bin of crappy doll clothes it goes!

Catty's boots are massive and very detailed, but let down as usual by being mostly unpainted. They're a bright pink which I find strange because the sculpting with the cracks implies to me that these were designed to be silver and continue the cracked mirror motif Catty uses. 

The heel is a sort of crystal like structure? I'm not sure what it's supposed to be but it reminds me of the shoes from Boo York Boo York.

 While Catty's feet look to be the same size as the other dolls, her legs are so much thicker that they can't really share a lot of shoes. 

Catty's accessories feature a broken hand mirror (not very useful), a microphone with cracked motifs up it, a phone, a drink bottle (I think it's a drink bottle?) and a little booklet.

 

Even her phone is cracked. Like damn girl, is this the bad luck following you or something? 

The booklet has music notes inside, with three different songs with corrections in red pen. 

None of them are long enough to be a real song but i'm super curious as to whether these even sound like anything coherent. 

So yes... I downloaded a music program because i'm clearly insane. 

And yes, they do play a tune. I don't recognise them though, are they from the show or just random little dittys?

The microphone is a bit of a pain to get Catty to hold because her little finger likes to splay out and not squish into the ring part and then if you manage to squeeze it in the whole hand gets a bit crushed so hmmm.

Still not sure how useful a broken mirror is.

Catty's bag is a big dark pink heart with cat ears. There's a 13 on there, a lightening bolt and two zippers but they're not painted so they get lost.

The bag opens which is cool, but the way the chain style straps are inserted means that it's very difficult to actually put her accessories IN the bag. Those oversized rubbery bits get in the way. I don't quite understand why they're so huge, the other big backpacks don't have quite such ridiculous stoppers right? 

I'm tempted to cut them shorter but then i'm worried there's a good reason they did this and cutting them short will somehow mess things up. I dunno. 

Her glasses are inexplicably blue which doesn't tie into anything else in her outfit and this bothers me a bit. But they also have a magnifying effect in the lenses which looks pretty goofy when they're on I think. One of the lenses is cracked, because of course it is. Mattel had ONE motif and they used it to death. 

g3 seems to do that a lot. 

So given Catty obviously can't wear other monster high clothes, what CAN she wear? 

well, some stretchy Barbie stuff kinda fits, but tend to be gappy in the shoulders. Sleeves and pants are also too long.

Naturalistas dress is stretchy too and fits really nicely but i'm not sure this style is really her.

Likewise this Fresh Dolls top fits pretty well but the sleeves are a touch long and it's long in the body making it more like a tunic top.

And this vintage dress fits really nicely, I wish I knew what doll this dress was made for. 

Most other doll brand pants and skirts are too small to fit over her thighs and hips and a lot of tops are too wide the shoulders.  She's got quite narrow shoulders and surprisingly slender arms actually. 

So that awful plastic jacket top thing had to go, and I had this LOL OMG shrug in my stash that is gorgeously soft and happens to be the exact right shade of pink. Yes! I love when things work out like that. 

I also found some fishnet leggings in my stash which are too big for most other dolls. I don't remember where they came from. They would fit better if I could get her tail off, but as it stands they have to sort of sit under her tail and then scrunched up around her hips at the front. 

They're footless leggings so they need boots to work and like the shrug, are just the right shade of pink. 

I like how they pull her look together.

The lack of painted details bothered me though, so taking a note from other people, I got out some metallic paint and set to painting some of the details. 

I considered painting the whole shoe silver like it was clearly supposed to be, but I find that whenever I paint large areas of shoe it never looks as "factory" as I would like. Her shoes were cast in pink, so should be mainly pink despite the intention of their sculpting.  So I decided instead to simply pick out the details Mattel elected not to paint.

Zippers, the chains, and the heels themselves all got a touch of silver. Also all the eyelets of the belt parts. 

This silver paint is old Citadel paint and it's so shiny, way shinier than their modern metallics. It matches the factory silver so closely, which is delightful.

And so here's her finished look. She got some random bracelets from the stash too.

I did try to redo her hair so her ponytail was a bit higher and she does appear to have a parting under there, but her ears make styling her hair really awkward so I just tied it back up and left it be. 

I really love how her outfit came together. 

I'm not convinced the blue glasses work though. Silver would maybe have made more sense?

I painted the 13 on her drink bottle and the details on her bag too, just so everything tied in. 

regarding her bottle, the lid comes off far too easily and i'm not totally sure why it opens anyway. Just gluing it would have made it stay together and avoid the problem. 

But overall i'm really happy with Catty. Her hair is lovely and soft, her body sculpt is really nice, I really like the undertones her black skin has and I ADORE her face. 

 She honestly makes g1 Catty look so blank and lifeless, which I find with a lot of the g3 sculpts actually. Something about how much more cartoonish the sculpts are and the expressive eyes really makes a big difference. 

Now Mattel, if you could give the boys the same level of love that'd be grand. Instead of those bizarro staring hexagon eyes. I mean wtf is that about? 

But yeah, 

I give Catty a solid 9 out of 10 shards of broken glass littering her backpack. 

Seriously, be careful digging around in there girl. You're gonna hurt yourself.