a brief break from the purge

Never fear, I AM still selling stuff. To see the things i've got for sale please check out http://flyingpurplemonkfish.blogspot.com/2018/08/ramping-it-up-on-sales-posts.html

But while I slowly and steadily save up for expensive stuff, I also encountered some interesting things in the charity shop today and being weak as I am, a couple of dollies came home with me (I KNOW i'm WEAK!)




The first doll I spotted was a mystery girl.

At first I was going to leave her, but something about her unusual face just made me so curious.

She has really thick super 80s/90s hair with tinsel in it and no marking on her head at all. Her back reads "made in china". I suspect this might be her original dress, underneath she has a pair of nice lace underpants lol. I love real dolly undies.

She was only £2. She's a very well made doll. Her arms and legs are heavy vinyl like old Barbie legs, so she has a bit of heft to her. Her knees click and hold nice and strong and she has an asymetric torso joint like some 80s barbie dolls do.
Her hair is very very thickly rooted as well, there's SO MUCH of it.

Makes me think she can't possibly be "just a clone". She's too well made to be a clone doll. Her face kinda reminds me of Maxie with how squared and elongated it is but I don't recognize her, at all. Who the heck is she?

She has the remains of a plastic tag in her head, like a modern doll would, but her face and hair seem older to me. She was in a box of mostly 90s dolls and her styling screams that sort of era to me. The big hair, the ott dress with the crazy shoulder action.

But with no markings I cannot look her up. Anyone got any ideas?

The box o' dolls also contained a couple of hasbro sindy dolls, a lot of old barbies and a few monster high clones of pretty poor quality. They also had a La Dee Da but her knees looked badly damaged.

I also saw a Novi Star in another charity shop who had lost her outfit and was in a pretty bad state. Which was a real shame, she was Justina time or whatever her failed pun name was, who was only available in one store here in the Uk for a brief period of time. She was too mangled for me to want to try to fix.

I did pick up a brand new box set of the Ghoulfriends Forever books, the first three. £4 seemed a good price. I already have a very battered copy of the first book which I actually enjoyed quite a bit, so I look forward to reading 2 and 3. I do sometimes love a bit of fiction that's way too young for me lol.

Meanwhile though, back in the first charity shop I hid from the rain in, I spotted this girl:

Her box was mangled but the doll inside was intact with all her stuff. She's Japanese Barbie from 1995.

The store clerk said she'd been sent to ebay and failed to sell, poor girl. So I gave her a home. At only £4 I thought it was well worth it. I mostly just wanted her kimono. Ahem.

Her box has a blurb on the back talking about Japanese culture or something. It's trying hard to be educational. I can't help but kinda wish the poor doll had a NAME though, "hi i'm japanese barbie" just sounds.. weird.

She says her obi is "tied in a special way" which just seems needlessly obtuse. Special how? What do you mean Japanese Barbie!??

Now, as I know like.. nothing about Japanese culture I don't know how much of her outfit is actually authentic or not, but hey, it's pretty and at least at the time Mattel were trying to be educational.

What does the Kanji say? Anyone?

This is interesting I think. I mean, look at this. 2 year warranty?! Actual contact details with times they're open on? "we are dedicated to quality products"?? this is not something you see on modern boxes. Mattel hasn't been dedicated to quality in quite some time.

And here's that warranty. I mean sure it's US only which is a bit crap, but a two year warranty!?? Though I bet they weasled out of most claims with their "accidental misuse" clause.

I elected to free this poor girl from her prison because her box was in such rough shape and you know, I wanted the kimono.

It was a little tricky to pull the backing card out with the box so crushed but I managed.

At the back I was greeted with an assortment of twisty ties. EEE twisty ties! Plastic ones!
These aren't sharp like the wire ones and untwist super easy.

One for each wrist, one for the waist, one for the shoulders and one for the head.

She has NO staples in her head and her hair wasn't sewn into the box either, she was free in moments.

The only fiddly bit I had was getting the shoulder wire off, as it was wound around one arm, up and around the other and UNDER ALL HER CLOTHING. So I had to strip her to get the wire off. What a bizarre thing to do.

Her kimono was also threaded together, presumably to keep it together in the box and stop it gaping or whatever. Unravelling all that thread took a bit of time.

so... much.. thread.

Her backing card is remarkably simple and she came with her shoes packaged separate in a little baggie with a brush.

She even came with a saddle stand. Cool.

Her kimono is made of really soft quite thin feeling material, but it's double thickness so it feels pretty sturdy. Her obi attaches at two points on the kimono with velcro and then fastens at the back with velcro too, while the kimono itself fastens shut with two plastic poppers.

Her shoes go on pretty easily over the socks she was wearing already.

They're platformed to accommodate the barbie heeled foot.

Underneath her outfit she was an old style Barbie body with the giant shoulders, wasp waist and robot arms. She also has Bs all over her groin. I know it's meant to be underwear but I always found this strange because there's no molded underpant line, so it always looks like the doll just has some sort of hideous skin problem from a distance, like a wax job gone horribly wrong or something.
They kinda fixed that later by giving them white crotches but yeah... flesh toned B printed pants are weird.

She also has 90s Barbie pierced hand syndrome. For whatever reason Mattel decided Barbie needed bling, and that meant ramming an oversized stud through her dang hand. Of course most dolls rapidly lost their "ring" and were left with a hole in their hand forever more.
I always thought it looked weird, the gem is so out of scale anyway and the pierced hand looks painful.
Painted on rings were a better solution.

She uses the Kira face mold, one I haven't seen in years. Though I can't say this doll looks very "Japanese" to me. I can't help but wonder if maybe it's slightly you know... iffy of Mattel to use the same face for like ALL their "asian" and "pacific" dolls. Kinda like saying "you all look the same so whatevs"
I mean this sculpt has been used to depict Japanese girls, Malaysian, Filipino, Peruvian, Inuit, Hispanic, Hawaiian... it's a bit bizarre really. They still do this of course, reusing face molds for like everything, but at least these days they change things up with drastically new facial screenings and a variety of skin tones so the same face looks well, you know, actually different. Back in the mid 90s? noooot so much. Basically you had black barbie with one face, white barbie with a handful of different ones and then "other non white" got this mold. Mattel has never been very good at making dolls of "other non white" ethnicities to be fair, they never made that many in the first place so maybe we should just be grateful we got SOME Asian barbie dolls at all.

She is pretty though, and to be honest, as a white chick myself, what right do I really have to criticize?

And at least she's not a white chick in a kimono like SOME of the "japan barbies" out there.

Anyhoo, speaking of white chicks in kimonos...

Turns out is is a little big on Sindy, the front gapes a bit and there's some nip slippage risk (if sindy had nipples of course)

Punk Sindy doesn't look impressed about this.

Makies actually can fit it pretty well, though it's a bit too long on them. I expected this not to fit but there ya go. It's pretty loose on the Barbie doll so that makes it fairly versatile.

It even fits on my husband's Resinsoul Bei, who's very slender. Perfect length even (it seems a little short on the actual Barbie but I dunno how long Kimonos are actually supposed to be)

Sadly the shoes won't fit anyone but Barbie, they're too narrow in the toe.
Like ALL Barbie shoes. Nobody else has hoof feet quite like a Barbie doll.

I'm sure Japanese Barbie is quite relieved to be free of her box after 23 years, it certainly was a novelty to be able to open a doll that old.

Of course, I shouldn't be buying more stuff when i'm trying to declutter, but sometimes the temptation is just too much. I'm bad. I can't help myself.

I think I should just not go into the charity shop on my way to the post office any more lol. it's dangerous!