Monster High - Electrified - Silvi Timberwolf

Electrified, the latest movie or something from Mattel. I dunno, the info out there is pretty scarce.
Anyway, Electrified is the newest MH reboot line to hit and it features some pretty 80s inspired fashions and super crimped hair.

Now, these were revealed at toyfair earlier in the year, and were kinda interesting.

They also introduced us to a new character. A brand new werewolf that wasn't related to Clawdeen. About time right? We have how many werecats?

Then actual in hand photos started to pop up and I personally was pretty horrified to realise how bad the hair actually looked.
Looking back at these promo pictures, it really shouldn't have been such a surprise, you can see the dried frazzled ends on these dolls too but seeing them in hand and at their worst was a bit of a shock.
I mean, crimped hair is nothing new on dolls, but crimped hair that looks actually damaged out of the box? That's a new low.

Naturally this meant I HAD to get a hold of one to see just how bad the hair actually was. Because nobody who had them in hand seemed to want to talk about it, or kept underplaying it with "oh it looks worse in photos" and I wasn't sure if I should believe that or not.

So Amazon (I know, ew) got Silvi and Ari in for £16:99. No stock, but they said "stock soon" and I figured it was the lowest the price was gonna be so I ordered Silvi.
I still don't like Ari and of all the electrified dolls Silvi's hair looked the worst in photos, so she seemed a very good representative for the line.

So I got a dispatch notice on the 9th, and Ari's listing was mystereously pulled with no explanation. Shortly after so was Silvi's. Odd.
But still, mine had dispatched so I assumed she'd be with me within a few days.
HAH
Amazon reminded me of why I hate them and shouldn't buy from them.

I got tracking and thought "oh that's odd" when they were telling me "expected delivery 16th dec" until I clicked tracking and found that the item ordered from Amazon uk, dispatched BY Amazon uk was in fact dispatching from POLAND.
Wtf?

My doll slowly hitchhiked across Europe before finally arriving in the UK this morning.

I wasn't impressed.

Especially as my parcel arrived in Amazon packaging, with amazon.co.uk emblazoned on it. Since when did Amazon uk use Amazon poland's warehouses?
Utterly bizarre.

But she arrived! So I eagerly opened my box to see just how bad things were

I was prepared for bad hair.

I wasn't quite prepared for what I got.

So here she is in her slim budget box. I still think it's cheeky as all hell Mattel expect us to pay £16:99 for dolls that come without handbags, brushes or stands. It's massively overpriced for what you get.

Anyway,

The box is not one you'll be opening and keeping. It's the newer style blister pack so you have to rip the plastic off the front to get into it.

The back isn't hugely interesting, though what is worth noting is there's no sign of that Venus pictured at toyfair. I wonder if maybe she's a store exclusive or something? Seems odd though to show her off and then have no sign of her.

Silvi doesn't have a bio on the EU boxes, not sure if she does on US boxes.
It just says "Silvi Timberwolf, daughter of the grey werewolves" because... grey werewolves are different to normal werewolves? Seems strangely specific.

Her artwork is kinda cool with this huge 80s hair.

Apparently the name of this budget but not so budget priced line is "hair-Raising Ghouls"

Now can you see my surprise yet?

Maybe a closeup is neccisary.

Nose smear AND eyebrow smear. Eugh.

I figured i'd open her anyway because I could fix her nose. I thought I could fix her eyebrow too but turns out that's not a paint smear. Oh no, it's worse than that.

It's a big scuff through the plastic itself, a gouge out of her face. How the hell did this happen?

Such a bummer as previously i've had really good luck ordering reboot dolls online.

I mean look at this thing! I thought it was glue till I deboxed her and got a closer look.

Anyway, I got her open anyway and it didn't take too long. Had to destroy the box in the process but she only had two staples in her head and not too many ties holding her down.

I scrubbed her nose with nailpolish remover to try to fix the smeared paint but it's not perfect. Her nose has a scuff on it as well which is probably what caused the smudge in the first place. There's a circular scuff on the tip of her nose.
Wth were they doing to this poor girl?

I was surprised by how UNcrimped her hair actually was in the box. I pulled her out and ran my hands through it and as suspected, it's dry as hell.
But mine seems to have very little actual crimping. I've seen others who's hair looks more like that front piece all over and that front piece? It's horrible to touch. It's dry as a bone and it's all stuck together in a clump and it's awful. If all her hair was like that, i'd be rerooting the head because yessh. It's gross.

Thankfully it's not all like that. On my particularly Silvi.

For some reason she was packaged with her hair split into two halves which means it looks even worse.
But you can kinda see how undercrimped it actually is.
The top layer and the bottom layer are crimped but the hair in between isn't really, and I think this half-arsed crimping has saved her hair.
It's still dry, it's still frizzy but it doesn't feel too horrible. It feels kinda like vintage doll hair, dried out and a bit frazzled but still brushable.

Sadly she didn't come WITH a brush and she really needs one. 

I used my big Moxie Teenz brush and managed to get it combed out.

The ends look awful, more awful with the camera flash really. Her hair, well, I can't say it's the worst doll hair i've ever handled, but it's certainly nowhere near the softness or the quality i've come to expect from Mattel. They've done crimped hair dolls before, they've never had hair this dry.

But I think there's a good reason for that. See, usually crimped doll hair is crimped prior to being rooted, like you'd root in curly hair for really curly styles right? This hair is actually straight nylon (I think it's nylon) which has then been crimped afterwards, probably using an actual crimper, so heated irons. If anyone's ever used straighteners on a doll's hair, you'll know, it's really easy to melt the hair and it's also really easy to damage the hair by drying it out with the heat.
I think that's what's happened here.
I'm no expert on dolly hair, but the impression I get is that they rooted in some fairly mediocre nylon (it doesn't feel like the kanekellon MH usually uses) and then crimped it after it was styled.
This would explain why some dolls have more crimped hair than others, and also why there's bits that are more dry and gross than other bits because the underside of Silvi's hair that isn't crimped? It's actually fairly soft.

The hair quality reminds me very much of the later Bratzillaz actually, it's dense and kinda heavy.

For some utterly bizarre reason her hair is way longer on one side than the other. Which just makes it look even more choppy and awful.

It's a really pretty shade of blue, similar to Ghoulia's lighter blue with streaks of yellow and pink.

The front section on one side is crimped to hell and it's all stuck together into a sort of chunk. It is awful and dry and crispy. Yuck.

There doesn't seem to be any styling product in her hair.

Her face is quite sweet. She has these big reboot eyes in purple and blue with a thick dark upper lash in black and lower lashes in fushia pink. She has blue eyeshadow that flicks out with her lashes at the edges. It's pretty.
Her lips are bright pink with small fangs.
Unlike Clawdeen she has a little animal nose painted on.

She wears bright pink spiked earrings in her fuzzy little ears.

She has a flattened profile with quite a shallow nose, which is more animal-like than Clawdeen's or any of her family.
Like reboot Clawdeen she has fuzzy wrists.

And fuzzy ankles.

I took her hair out of her updo to see why it was so lopsided. It looks like it's cut evenly, it's just cut into these layers and they don't like to sit exactly even when you tie it up.

Having it down showed me how soft the non crimped parts of her hair actually are, and made me more annoyed that Mattel decided to ruin it with their bizarre "let's melt crimps into this" idea.
I got lucky with this girl because her hair isn't very crimped at all, and that means it's managable and not a damaged frazzled mess but i'd really suggest if you were gonna buy electrified, go into store and pick one out in person who's hair looks straighter. They'll have less damaged hair and it'll be way easier to fix by trimming the frazzled ends than a more crimped one.

I tied her hair back up, but it still doesn't want to be even. I had to yank the bottom layer sideways to try to even it up.

Her hair is so dry it has a tendency to just sorta stick out in any direction you put it into. A bit like fur or troll hair lol.
I suppose that's fun if you want to style BIG hair.

I dunno how I missed this in promos, but I failed to see that her dress was brightly coloured wolves.
So yeah, it's wolves.
Pink, yellow and blue wolves on a black background.

Her dress is made of stiff fabric with this nasty yellow plasticky stuff at the bottom and plethery plastic for the top part.
It's not a bad dress, I just think it looks horrible against Silvi's grey skin.
Yellow and light grey is a combo that I find kinda nauseating.
I like yellow. I like grey. I don't like them together.

The pattern is kinda cool though. I like the idea because at first glance it looks like abstract splotches of colour and then it's like "oh yeah, it's wolves." which is clever.

She also has this weird plastic shoulder piece which looks like feathers? I don't quite get why. Her hairtie thing has feathers too. I don't really associate feathers with wolves. A werecat sure, but a werewolf?

Her shoes are cool. they're very soft plastic, neon yellow and slightly opaque. The heel is a big crescent or claw/fang thing and the straps look like electricity zig zags?
I dunno, bit random.
But they are kinda cool and super easy to put on and take off again.

I'm not sure what the earrings are, they look like teeth or something.
They snag on her hair a lot.

Her dress is one piece, that vinyl top thing is part of the dress. Not sure I like that so much, but then, i'm not overly fond of the dress on Silvi anyway.

It's not very flattering without the pink feathery bit.

Having taken her earrings out, I noticed more "can't be arsed" from the factory workers. (was it a friday night and they just wanted to go home?). There's loads of excess plastic behind her ears (which btw have moulded fur on them which is adorable).
I had to cut the extra plastic off, but all four of her earring holes had this massive tag of plastic behind which was pretty unsightly.

I could NOT get a good picture of her hair tie thing. It's black with studs on and what looks like feathery bits around the bottom.

This was the best I could manage.

Silvi's on the standard reboot body (Clawdeen version) with the furry arms and legs. Her skin tone is pale grey, quite similar to Ghoulia's skin tone, it's a tough lighter than Ghoulia but yeah, pale grey. Kinda standard, we have a lot of pale grey mh characters don't we?

I took her out of her icky yellow dress and put her into something darker that I thought would pop a bit better with her pale skin and blue hair.
Her she is alongside reboot Clawdeen.
Silvi has far less worried eyebrows and actually a somewhat friendlier face.
Clawdeen looks scared. Silvi looks friendly.

Their face sculpts are quite different. Silvi's nose is a lot flatter particularly, and she has a longer chin.

I hate to admit it given Silvi was a doll I was going to give a big ol' miss to, but the more I played with her, the more her eager friendly little face grew on me. Despite her big ol' gouged up face and horrible hair, I find her... kinda endearing. ARGH

Clawdeen's hair is nice and soft, a bit frizzy at the ends but it's soft and nice to run your hands through.
Silvi's isn't. It's not as horrible as I was expecting based on pictures, I admit, people were right, it looks way worse in photos, but it's still not nearly the quality I would expect from Mattel. Particularly not for a line that's deluxe priced.

at £16:99 for the BUDGET dolls in the line, the deluxe ones are likely to be over £20 and this sort of hair quality is frankly unacceptable for that price point. Particularly the deluxe ones which are billed as hair play dolls. You can't have dried, frazzled hair on a hair play doll!

I did manage to tame her hair with a lot of finger combing, but it's not great. She's up there in the contest for "worst hair" of any mh doll i've ever handled. It's not sticky like Twyla's signature doll, but instead it feels old or damaged and that's sad.

I get what they were going for, they wanted big 80s hair but i'm not convinced they couldn't have done it in a manner that didn't burn the hair and dry it out.
I also don't quite understand why they felt the need to cut the hair in such a choppy haphazard manner. My Silvi's hair is probably one of the better examples, but it's still uneven and wierdly cut. I don't get why they've hacked it up like a scissor happy toddler. It's bizarre.

But I will say this about her, she's got a damn sweet little face and despite her pretty glaring flaws, I think i'm keeping her.

DOH.

I'm a sucker for a cute face.

and Silvi really does have an extremely cute face.

Final verdict?

Overpriced. Hair isn't as dire as I feared but still isn't very good. Outfit is okay but not to my taste. Face is cute. Body is good. No stand, no brush, no accessories, no diary.

Be aware.

Kids might not mind the hair so much, but I think collectors are gonna notice and be disappointed. So keep it in mind.

I don't think i'll be getting any of the rest of this line. But Silvi surprised me by being remarkably adorable despite being battle scarred.

The MH reboot is definitely getting cheaper in terms of production and what they're giving consumers, while the prices continue to hike. I'm not impressed by this and it means this is likely to be the last MH doll I get for a while.
I'm also not overly impressed with Mattel's recent use of early prototypes in their promo and stock images which give a completely false impression of the final product.
Electrified Clawdeen suffered this a lot, her promos showed really vivid makeup, which has been completely toned down for her production doll (and her face looks weirdly elongated and I can't work out how the hell they did that. What'd they DO?!).

Far too many static armed dolls are being produced as well, along with way too many gimmicky dolls. I never liked gimmicks even as a kid, they got old fast. Heck, I remember how much I LOATHED my talking My Little Pony. Oh she was horrible. She never shut up with her "i'm pretty, comb my hair, comb my hair!" ew. *shudder* and half the time I recall the gimmicks never worked how they did in the adverts anyway. Same is true today. I'm old and jaded, I ain't got no time to fall for marketing tricks.

As a result, i'm feeling just a bit cheated by Mattel right now with their MH franchise. I don't HATE the reboot so much, I just hate the direction Mattel are taking it. Misleading stock images, static arms, moulded clothing, cheap nylon hair, half print dresses on several of the upcoming releases and prices that simply do not represent those budget cuts. If you're gonna give me so much less, I better be paying less not more than I was 2 years ago.  I get there's a recession, and all that blah blah blah, but it means consumers have less to spend as well! And if Mattel can keep their fashionistas feeling worth it at the same price of £10, why can't Monster High?

I can live without stands (it's a bummer but I can) and brushes (I have billions) and handbags (they only go in a box anyway). But i'm starting to feel like a lot of the passion for mh is waning on the production end, like Mattel themselves just don't care so much any more and that's really sad.
The reboot and the storyline etc feel very half hearted, very "eh it'll do" and the attention to detail we used to get seems kinda lacking in the newer releases. You get glimmers of brilliance like Moanica's disease print clothing and then really lazy boringness like Ari.. just.. all of Ari.

I like Silvi. I like Moanica. I like the few reboot MH dolls i've bought recently but they aren't as exciting to me as MH was back when it launched, they don't have that same sparkle, that same buzz about them. The franchise feels like it's stagnating a bit, and that's a shame. It was a good run, and we got some cute dolls outta it, but i'm not convinced they're really bringing anything NEW with the line anymore.
We're yet to see a new monster type introduced as a new character for instance, they're all rehashes of existing monsters. A ghost, a zombie, a werewolf. (Does Dayna count? She's not even a damn monster, she's just made of gold.) and with everything we knew having been retconned for some sloppily rushed together new universe it all just leaves a bit of a bitter taste in the mouth.

All good things must end, and I think, for me, Silvi here signifies the end of my mh collecting.
Unless of course Mattel really pull something outta the bag next year and surprise me.

I just don't think the price is worth it.

I don't regret buying Silvi, but I do think I was overcharged.

I would though, like to thank personally Sophie Cowley, who generously donated a little toward my "help me afford a doll I want to review but can't justify buying" fund. You really took the sting out of this purchase and without you, I really doubt i'd have been able to convince myself to buy her.
So thank you Sophie! YOU ROCK!

Every time I look up at the shelf, i'll think of you.

ALL the virtual hugs! and i'm totally gonna have to do something nice to repay you.

okay okay, enough rambling...

I give Silvi 6 frazzled hair disasters out of 10. I LIKE her, but she needed complete redressing, her facepaint redone and an awful lot of fussing over her hair to get her looking halfway decent, and her hair still looks horrible in photos. it looks "okay" irl, but it looks absolutely disgusting in pictures and as someone who takes pictures of their dolls a lot, this just isn't cool.

Okay it's not really fair to deduct points for her arriving with scuffed up face, but it's my blog and i'll be brutal if I wanna.
Really most of those points are her hair... and how bad yellow looks against pale grey. *gag* seriously who the hell thought that was a great colour combo? it's worse than yellow on Draculaura. Damnit Mattel, stop putting colourblind people in charge of colour schemes and stop ramming random yellow onto pale skinned dolls! it looks HORRIBLE.

Catty will so look awesome in it though.
More yellow for Catty yes?