Now there's a story behind this particular acquisition.
you see, back in February I purchased this exact doll on Vinted, but the seller then ghosted me and never sent my parcel. I got a full refund of course, but ever since it's pissed me off and i've pined for this doll. I assumed they'd either misplaced her (they're a clearance company or something, so likely have a big warehouse) or gotten a better offer elsewhere but I stalked both their ebay and vinted pages for weeks hoping they'd relist her.
they never did.
until this week (October)
A full 8 months later, who should appear on Ebay from the exact same seller?
you got it, the same doll i'd bought back in February.
For twice the price i'd paid originally.
typical.
but I looked at her, I felt all those emotions again and I thought "you know what? Fuck it. I want her, I still want her 8 months later and i'm gonna try again."
so I bought her.
and yeah, i probably shouldn't be supporting this seller's shitty customer service but eh, I really really wanted the doll okay?
and then I waited, wondering if THIS time they'd actually bloody post her.
and they did! Which kinda surprised me, but then again, Ebay is a little more stroppy about sellers not sending items people purchase than Vinted who don't appear to have a strike system.
So, who is this doll who I have thought about for the past 8 bloody months?
She's Creata Toni.
Let's take a look!
So, Creata are/were a toy company who had a fair few different doll lines in the 80s and 90s. They're most well known for their Flower Princesses line and Lace, a sort of.. Jem/Barbie and the rockers style doll that interestingly, used some of the left over 1986 Sindy Disco Magic outfits.
Their dolls were lower priced and are often referred to as "clones" but technically are more "low cost competitors" the like of Steffi Love. They're fairly decently made, though like a lot of the dolls of the era, have a tendency to lose legs and for their hair to frizz a bit.
There is a blog post here from crystallinetoybox that catalogues a few of the Creata lines, but Toni isn't featured.
Sadly I couldn't find any info on her at all, beyond this one boxed doll.
she's a bit of a mystery.
She arrived looking a little drunk, sliding sideways in her box with her accessories scattered about her.
Now, first things first, this doll appears to use the same sculpt as the Creata Mermaid dolls who were released in 1991. Creata did this a fair bit, reusing dolls for new lines because it was cost effective to just repurpose.
But while she is a very very pretty doll, what actually got me so excited about this doll is her box.
can you spot why?
That isn't this doll. THAT is a Hasbro Sindy.
Every image on this box is a Hasbro Sindy. WHY? How? What the fuck Creata? These aren't your dolls. Did you get permission? Why didn't you use the doll that's in the box?
Now, it is possible that this doll came out during the period where Hasbro were no longer making Sindy dolls, but it still is pretty bizarre to steal their dolls for this photo shoot. And I feel like these photos weren't stolen, because there is, to my knowledge, no Hasbro Sindy that has this hair gimmick nor any who were black haired. So either these are clever photoshop jobs (did they have that in the 90s?) or more likely, they had some Sindy dolls which they used for the prototyping and for whatever reason used them for the photos.
I wonder if perhaps they were using former Sindy stock through a licence with Hasbro but it fell through last minute, so they hastily switched to their mermaids. It would explain the very blatant use of the Sindy dolls front and center like this and it wouldn't be without precedent, Creata DID sell Lace dolls wearing Sindy outfits in the 80s.
Whatever the case, there's a story here and it absolutely fascinates me.
What happened?
Hasbro ceased production of Sindy in 1997 and returned the license to Pedigree some time after. It was then licensed out to Vivid Imagination from 1999 into the early 2000s.
So perhaps this doll was made after Hasbro had abandoned the IP.
but how did Creata get a hold of the dolls and how much of this line was their own idea and how much was just repurposing an abandoned Hasbro concept?
Why is the final doll not even wearing the same clothes?
I'm so curious but this is a mystery i'll probably never learn an answer to. But isn't it fun to speculate?
anyway,
The back of the box features some more Sindy doll photos and a series of extremely vague instructions that really could have done with 1: more pictures/steps and 2: some play testing because hot damn.
I don't know if the doll originally would have also had a paper leaflet to explain things, there's no indication she did but I don't really know. This doll, it should be explained, I don't believe is MINT in box as she's missing a few pieces as listed on the packaging (namely the comb and one of the ribbons) so while the doll appears to have likely never been played with, I believe she was removed from her backing card at least briefly (as she's missing one of the twisty ties too) and that at some point in storage that comb fell out and got lost.
Make 2 more braids? MORE braids? I wasn't even told to make a first set.
Two loops but put them where? In the image there's only one loop. Where does the second loop go?
Am I just really stupid when it comes to these sorts of hair styling instructions? Because I always seem to struggle with hair play instructions aimed at children. I'm starting to think i'm stupid.
And goddamnit I just lost the circle game too.
Damn you Creata!
So here's Toni with all her stuff. As I mentioned, she's missing her comb and one ribbon as far as I can tell. But the rest is all here.
the doll herself is quite grubby too and her hair is very big and frizzy at the ends.
She comes with two purple bits of cord with beads at the ends (called "styling loops" on the box), one longer bit of cord with a bead (called inexplicably a "pom pom loop" despite having no pompom), a pink loop with a pink bow (also called a pompom loop but clearly actually a bow, but close enough), a satiny ribbon and a blue scrunchie with a bow on it.
None of the cords are elasticated, they tighten purely by moving the bead and honestly, they don't tighten very well or stay tightened so hmm.
Toni is, as you can see, quite dirty. One of her eyes is larger than the other but her paintwork is very nicely done, crisp and clear and with a nice shine to it.
Her hair is a pretty slightly auburn brown with a messy fringe.
I do like this head sculpt, she is I think one of the prettiest dolls Creata made.
Her outfit is quite simple but pretty nice. The first piece is this blue top with tassels. Sadly, the fringe isn't sealed so they're unravelling pretty rapidly. I ended up putting some glue on the ends in a vain attempt to stop them completely falling apart of me.
Somewhat curiously, this top has no fastener. It's effectively sewn onto the doll. You CAN get it off if you're very careful but it hasn't really got any elastication or give so it's pretty awkward. Certainly I get the impression a child wasn't supposed to remove this, or you were supposed to snip the thread at the front and end up with the top never sitting correctly ever again. But it is pretty securely sewn together so i'm not entirely convinced this was just for the purposes of looking good in the box.
Under the top there's a very plain little yellow jumpsuit thing. It's decently made, though the fabric is a little thin so you can see her skin through it. It fastens up the back with velcro and has a label inside that only says "made in china"
She also has a pair of pointy toed pink heels but they're not overly interesting, they're pretty cheaply made and they don't stay on her damn feet anyway.
Under all that she has a very Barbie-like body with click knees, tiny little hoof feet and even an angled waist joint.
As I know full well that Creata dolls and a lot of other dolls from this era have very very weak hip pegs, i'm a little wary of how her hips are gaping there and rather afraid to bend her legs at all in case they shear off completely (as usually happens. Alas)
Her body is decent, the limbs are vinyl, the body is hard plastic and while she's probably not quite as hefty as a Barbie doll, she still feels like a decent quality doll made with proper materials. No blown hollow plastic bullshit here thank you very much.
her head is on a ball. I love this as a head connector for two reasons. 1: It's far less likely to break than the old Barbie style pegs and 2: you can pop the head off to pull jumpers or necklaces or whatever else onto them.
Also they tend to be able to move their head a lot more because a ball joint has more mobility than a pivoting peg.
This doll's gimmick is this "styling cord" thing, which it turns out is a bit of yellow cord that's threaded through the top of her head and then out the back here. There's a bead on one end.
From what the instructions on the box say, you're supposed to pull this thread at the back of her head to "style" her hair.
Now, I initially had assumed that this would work a bit like other dolls with a "pull to style" gimmick where it was attached to some hair and when you pulled it, pulled the hair with it. But that's not the case here. No, instead it appears the idea was that the bead on the end of the cord would hit the bead on the end of the styling loops (those purple things earlier) and pull the hair that way.
the problem is that the beads don't lock in place, they're slightly too big for the cords and so they slip. More often than not, i'd pull the styling cord and the bead on the loop would slip and the cord would just slide straight through the loop and do nothing at all.
*sigh*
Try try again.
I puzzled over the instructions. But basically you put the loops in like this... I think.
And then when you pull the cord, if all goes well, it'll yank the hair up with it into a sort of messy bun thing.
I mean, you can basically only ever do some sort of variation on messy bun thing.
and several times attempting to tighten the beads on the purple loops resulted in the whole thing coming apart again.
this gimmick doesn't work very well.
It would be so much easier to just use elastic bands to get this sort of style, surely?
I mean let's be real here, is this sort of loopy bun thing with lots of cords hanging all over the place really worth the effort when I could have just taken a single elastic band, wrapped it around the hair and pulled a bit out to make the same effect?
Her hair is pretty soft for the most part, but it's also very very frizzy at the bottom. I gave it a wash and combed it but that only made the frizz more obvious really. I know there's ways to combat this, i just don't have the courage to take heat to her hair. Instead I opted to just trim the worst of the ends and leave it as is.
She really is an extremely pretty doll.
Useless gimmick or not, she's got a really lovely face and it turns out that Creata dolls really aren't that common here in the UK. I had fallen in love with this face back in february and have spent the following months searching for another doll with the same sculpt. While they seem to be pretty common in the US, I haven't found a single one in the UK and shipping from America is just ridiculous right now.
I wonder if they simply didn't market a lot of their products over here, which wouldn't be that much of a surprise. Even today the US market gets substantially more variety in their toy lines than the UK does.
Flower Princesses I can find fairly easily, Lace comes up every so often, but the others? Nope.
Which is interesting because the packaging on this girl has a British label taped over the US info, meaning she WAS sold here in the UK. So why have I never seen another? Was she some store exclusive? Was she pulled from shelves because of the Hasbro dolls on the packaging?
What's your story Toni!?
For now i've put her back into the box which fascinates me so.
I keep finding weird boxed dolls lately.
I saw another Sindy oddity on Ebay tonight as well and I only have one question
WHO THE FUCK IS SHANA!??
Apparently French Sindy had a friend named Shana, and their Imani used her face sculpt rather than the Olmec one.
what... the hell?
I don't need French speaking Imani.. I don't need French speaking Imani... but damn I kinda want her. lol.
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