Hairdorables - big hair don't care

Yeah I know, I was doing SO WELL at not buying stuff but the past few weeks i've been weak. I suppose there's only so many months you can go without buying anything before your resolve cracks.

The good news is the I have MADE MY GOAL! whooo!

I'm so relieved.

By way of celebration, and also because eldest started secondary school so I was up anyway, husband and I went out yesterday and went shopping.

New stuff has FINALLY hit stores which means there's actually stuff that's vuagely interesting on shelves for the first time since... oh god.. I can't remember the last time interesting shit was actually in stores man.

The toy store had a LOT of LOL including the new ones but I don't really NEED a lot of LOL so I passed up on those.
But I couldn't see in their store the other newest blind box doll to hit the market, Just Play's "Hairdorables".

We actually ended up finding them in the big department store, of all places. Go figure.

Anyway, I admit, yet ANOTHER blind box doll wasn't something I was thrilled about. I don't like this blind box craze and I feel like the prices are just going up and up and up for them. £2-3 for a mystery I am fine with, it's a small amount of money as a little thrill, but LOL are £11-12 and Hairdorables? they're £14:99! That's way too much for a mystery, for a product you can't even pick. What if you get one you don't like? What if you get doubles?
I don't like this method of selling dolls that should be just bloody sold as normal dolls.
Bah.

But I had been looking at photos and had kinda started to get interested in these brightly coloured goofy faced munchkin dolls.

I wanted to open just one, just to see what all the fuss was about.

I'll give Just Play one thing, the boxes ARE pretty enticing.

The bright cartoonish graphics are endearing and I like the purple, they stand out on shelves that's for sure.

The boxes are quite large, about 10 inches high which for a blind box is fricken massive.

The back is made up like.. uh.. is it instagram? I dunno, some sort of photo sharing social media *is old*

The mascot, who I believe is named Noah is taking a selfie to one side... though.. oddly what's displayed on the screen can't be her from that angle. Did she take the selfie then move the stick/phone and that's just displaying the pic? I dunno man, it's weird.

Do people even still USE selfie sticks?

and there's hashtags because you know, gotta be "down with the kids" #fingeronthepulse #totallynotabitcringe

It's... a kinda... odd choice for marketing to go with something as quickly and easily dated as social media.

It gets a bit more cringey on the side where it says "hello influencer"
I hate the term "influencer", it's stupid. Youtubers and bloggers aren't influencers, they're just bored people making videos for fun and free shit. (someone give me free shit? i want free shit! lol #totallynotabovebegging)

So apparently Noah became super popular because of a hair styling tutorial? Uh.. do hair style videos generally go viral?
Um.. okay.. sure, whatever. Viral braid tut... cool.

The other side of the box is more cartoons.

The whole box is covered by this weird clear plastic sleeve, I assume it's an anti tamper shield to stop people trying to peek inside or something. I dunno man.

The bottom of the box has four, count em FOUR social media accounts linked (wowza), various bits of bamph and tells you that hairdorables have their own hashtag and website and a youtube channel apparently (can we watch the braid tutorial?)

Also worth noting is the code embossed under the barcode.

Now from what I can establish the US original boxes didn't have these, but we're getting later boxes in the UK and ours all have these stamped number codes.
They remind me of the codes on lego minifigure blind bags which got me wondering.

I looked in the store, they had so many boxes, and found at least 2 that matched but a few that were all different so hmmmm...

I think they all end in 01 (series one?) but i'm not 100% on that.

Still, worth mentioning in case there's any relevance to the code. Usually these codes are for the factory staff themselves, a remnant of the packaging process or something, but they might be significant like the lego codes were...

Anyway, it's hard to read but this one says 1578ELT01 (I totally read it as ELTON first time lol)

The top of the box has a bright yellow card tab, but it's under the plastic sheath which first has to be removed.

It's just taped in place so it's not a very good anti tamper shield.

The tab leads to a perforated strip down the middle of the box. Ziiiiipppppp

And a poster falls out.

The whole box hinges open (it's held closed with velcro dots) with two compartments on either side.

I couldn't get the damn thing to lay flat, but it's cute. Look at all those impish faces!

And the other side shows you the dolls.

Now what's interesting is that while the box claims there's 36 dolls to collect, there's actually only 12 characters, there's just 3 variations of each.

Thankfully those variations are all pretty big variations so it's not just like, the same doll with a new hat. Some actual effort went into making all three have a theme but feel more like unique dolls.

A few are marked with little symbols. Heart means "signature look" and I find it odd that it's not always their first look. What's that about?

A green diamond means rare (1 in 40 according to Just Play's website) and star means "ultra rare" (1 in 400??!!!)

Good luck to anyone wanting that one, sheesh.

I really like Harmony, she has neon green hair, it makes me smile. Kali's cute too and Willow is a unicorn which is cool. I like quite a lot of these so that's reassuring. 

This side is bossy, telling me not to open what clearly contains the doll till last. I don't listen to boxes!

but this time, for the sake of the review I decided to obey the stop sign and do what Just Play intended. (bah)

The other side has numbers. I wonder why they have hands for 2 and characters holding up numbers for the others?

It's all very colourful and playful.

The little window is perforated so you can just pop it open and ease out... a yogurt pot?

It's a purple plastic yogurt pot.

It has a cute little plastic peel lid, but that's not helping with my "this is totally yogurt" vibes.

There's 3 of the "small" sized pots and then a final super LARGE pot. The last one genuinely is about the size of an actual yogurt lol.

Two have characters, two have slogans, they're all hair puns.

Tub 1... contains a small sticker sheet and a comb?

hmm, that seems like.. not a lot for such a large tub. You could fit about 10 combs into this tub!

I don't quite understand what you're meant to do with the stickers either.

Hmmm.

Tub two.. another sticker and ... shoes?

omg they're gummy bears! they're translucent and they're gummy bears!

The shoes even have embossed gummy bears on the soles, random.  They're slightly squishy.

The sticker seems to be a phone, you fold it in half and it's a... very flat phone. Uh.. okay?

again, not a lot in a large tub.

This is starting to feel very overpackaged and a bit wasteful.

Still, mismatched shoes might give a clue as to who's in the other side of this box!

Kat is option 1. She looks to have 2 dolls with mismatched shoes. the pictures are TINY so it's hard to see detail.

Option 2 is Dee, looks like ALL her versions have mismatched shoes.
She's cute.

Maybe tub 3 will clarify.

Another sticker and a pair of glasses? they seem to be made of red licorice.

I did wonder if the sticker was a hint, is it a photo of the doll? But she hasn't got glasses.

Looking back at Kat and Dee Dee, Dee Dee has a doll with glasses.

it's gotta be Sweet Treats Dee Dee right?

So what's in the GIANT tub that warrants it being so much bigger than the other three tubs?

Uh... right.. a sticker and a gummy bear hair decoration. Seriously? that's it? WHY IS THIS TUB SO BIG!??
wtf Just Play? Just... wtf?

This is some Amazon level of box packing here.

The gummy bear is cute though, made from the similar plastic as the shoes.
It's hard plastic, despite looking soft and squishy.

So we're pretty sure this is Sweet Treats Dee Dee right? So let's see the doll! 

The other compartment has a large plastic lid on it, with a really cute picture of Noah.

And another hair pun. *headdesk*

And here's our first glimpse at the doll!

An impish little grinning face, bright pink eyebrows and a teeny little dwarf body. All her hair is stuck into a hole behind her so she can be slotted into the plastic tub properly.

Behind the tub it's a closet... with really random clothes and stuff in it.

Behind her was a thick cardboard thing that has her bio on it.

Peppermint pink isn't a colour is it? Peppermint is green... surely? or red and white striped?

She makes candy apparently.

and claims "good friends are the sweetest". Hmmm, with that giant whisk i'm slightly worried she genuinely intends to turn her friends into sweet treats.

Look at that grin, would you put a bit of candy based homicide beyond her?

She's cute though. In a psycho "I'm gonna boil you down into candy" kinda way...

The other side of the bio card has a picture of Dee but the top of her head is cut off and.. there's someone else's legs? A puzzle piece? Interesting.
I suppose you gotta "collect em all" to complete the image huh?

 The gummy bear is a bit... awkward to get to go into her hair. The actual clip piece for it is made of plastic and a bit weak, but it's also positioned in such a way that the bear can't even sit on her pigtail the way it does in the art. Boo.
It seems to stick in there if you only put a small amount of hair through it, there's no WAY it could clip around her WHOLE pigtail, there's just too much hair.

HAIR really is this line's whole gimmick though, and wow... they really did embrace it. It's thick and it's soft and there's SO MUCH OF IT.

Dee Dee has bright pink eyebrows, huge purple eyes and a giant grinning mouth.

her face is very very cartoonish and I have to say, very very much like the artwork, which is nice.

 so... so much hair.

It's half pale green and half pale pink with a white streak down either side.

There's darker green and pink toward the edges of the pigtails so there's uh.. at least 5 different shades of hair being used here? which is interesting.

Her dress has  gummy bears on too (bit of a gummy obsession huh?) and a pink and white candy stripe top. It's fairly well made for a tiny garment with little frill sleeves and a lace trim. The print goes all the way around too. Yay!

The gummy shoes fit well.

Dee Dee's glasses don't fit her quite so well. The problem is her ears are quite low down her face, so the glasses like to move around on her big fat face.

That thing she's holding? the "phone" sticker. 1: it's actually too big for the doll and 2: it's pancake bloody flat. I know modern mobile phones are getting really skinny but this is ridiculous.
She can't even hold the damn thing.
What's the point?

With her glasses on she's really starting to give me EAH Ginger Breadhouse vibes, like omg. 

Under her dress she has a lovely pale green uh.. swimsuit? leotard? whatever.
it's strapless, oo eerr.

She has a huge head, it's a similar size to Monster High to be honest, but her body is teensy tiny. It's a wierd look. I thought i'd really hate it but I dunno, the more I look at her on her funny shrivelled body the more I get used to the bizarre proportions.

She has quite shapely legs and teeny twig arms that are posed all bent. They are I BELIEVE supposed to be doing that "heart" shape with her hands together, but she can also do a lot of amusing poses as a result.

The "i'm a little tea pot" pose.

"hula" pose

*knuckle crack*

"prepping for a fight" pose

She has a surprising amount of articulation for such a simple doll. I expected rather you know, back and forwards only simple joints but no, she has a ball shaped joint on both her shoulders and hips.

This means she can extend her legs outward nearly 90 degrees and pull her arms into "muscle man, i'm a  muscle muscle man" pose.

She can also just about put her posed arms on her hips and extend her legs out 90 degrees this way too.

And she sits like a champ.

She cannot however, move her head very well. It moves around, but she can't tilt it, at all. Which is a shame because that would really add to her personality I think. 

Also look, isn't that code familiar? 1578ELT01! the same code as the box!The plot thickens!

Talking to people online, it looks like these numbers indicate either case number or wave number. Wha? So.. probably aren't at all useful. Well damn. That sucks. No fair Just Play! COME ON! give us a tell! throw us a bloody bone!

Dee Dee is a small doll, standing at about 6 inches tall.

She's taller than the LOL dolls and given she's only £4 more expensive, of substantially higher quality I think. She has actual rooted hair and a real fabric outfit that covers her butt (seriously mga, what is up with the outfits not covering dolls arses? Why do you have this weird thing for baby arse? it's creepy!)

"Come Dawn, let's find a new vict... I mean... friend... yes... friend."

The box itself actually doubles as a backdrop for the doll, but it's a bit bulky to really display. Makes for a few nice photos but I can't really see myself keeping a lot of these around.

still, it makes for a useful place to store the doll and all her stickers.

I still have no idea what the diamond and heart stickers and for. Do you put them on the backdrop?

It looks like there's several variations of the backdrop, this particular one is a cafe. It does however make the closet in the compartments a bit... weird. I suppose you can't see them when the backdrop is fully open like this but when the sides are pulled in to make a "frame" around the doll you can and it's kinda strange.

So excluding the box itself and the collector chart poster thing, this is everything Dee came with.

4 accessories and 4 stickers.

Wait, weren't we told there were 11 surprises?

that's 8 (are stickers REALLY a surprise?) plus the doll is 9... what the hell are the other two? Which backdrop you get?
Can you count her bio card when it's kinda.. part of the doll?

I dunno man, i'm confused. Where's surprise 11? Just Play, you OWE ME A SURPRISE!

(though is it really a surprise when the second accessory you open gives the whole game away?)

to contrast, this is all the trash left over from deboxing this doll.

Compare to the "what's actually in the box" picture. Is this not absolutely shocking?

I mean I was disgusted to see this much waste. The government is trying to reduce plastic waste and here's Just Play going "fuck the oceans and shit, plastic everything everywhere!"
Wtf guys?
the tubs don't NEED to be this big to fit the "surprises" in and in fact, all the damn surprises would fit into the one big tub, it's just wasteful for the sake of suspense.

Yes the tubs are pretty with the peel away lids but sheesh, a whole box of waste? That's bad.

LOL have a lot of waste too with their wrappers, but at least those squish up small and fit into a bin. These? they're bulky and a pain to throw out.

I ended up putting the smaller tubs back into their slots for now.

But can you imagine how much waste this line will generate? Surely toy companies should be trying to REDUCE their pointless extra packaging and wastefulness, not making more of it.

Yes, yes, you need more packaging to make it a "surprise" but as I said at the start, why did this line HAVE to be a blind box in the first place?
Did they not think people would buy them on their own merit?

Honestly i feel like these would sell just as well, if not better, had they been packaged normally so you could see which one you were getting. Do the super rare one like Zelfs did, as a mail away limited edition or something.

But we live in an era where deboxing videos are replacing actual adverts and as a result surprise toys are all the rage just so youtubers will video themselves opening hundreds of the damn things one after the other.
*sigh*

Dee Dee is cute and i'd rather like to get a Harmony (the one with shorter hair I think is my favourite) but at £14:99 it's a lot to pay for a complete crap shoot as to which doll you'll get.

Much like with LOL, the parent in me recoils at the price of these. I'm sure they're gonna be insanely popular but good god it'll cost a fortune to get all the ones your kid (or you) want and you'll end up with SO many doubles. Already people are complaining about having loads of duplicates, which is concerning.

till we can figure out a way to actually tell boxes apart in stores (like the lego codes?) I think these will put off a lot of adults purely because of the odds and the amount of money you need to blow to get even one doll you like.
Sure it's fine if you like them all, but let's face it, most people will have a favourite and would rather like that one and either have to settle, or do what I intend to do, wait till the UK market starts to see lots of doubles and they start showing up, deboxed, on ebay... where I can just pick which ones I want and buy them sight SEEN.

Of course, I said that about LOL and it's a best seller. Mmm.
Maybe parents these days are way less frugal/stingy than my parents were and I am with my kids. I mean, I wouldn't let my kids gamble £15. 

Thing is, at what point do most people give up trying to find specific characters and just stop buying? I feel like not having a way to tell if this is a duplicate not only results in disappointed kids, but also disappointed and frustrated collectors who'll then get tired of the hunt and give up.
Ultimately, I just cannot see this method of distribution with completely blind mystery boxes (they aren't in an outer case like LOL so there's really NO way to tell which one you're getting) having longevity. Too many people will buy a few, then get loads of doubles and just quit.

At £15 the outlay is too high. It's not a "quick fix fun little surprise", it's actually a substantial wad of money and while the dolls are cute and all, they're probably £10-12 dolls with their price hiked by a few more quid for the over packaging and "surprise" element.

I like Dee Dee, i'd like to get her a friend, but as there are a few I don't really like in this collection, I cannot justify paying another £15-30 and risk getting doubles or one I just don't really want. Sure i could resell but that's a pain in the arse, it takes time, it takes effort and it usually results in taking a loss. It also requires a trip to the post office. All in all, it's a lot of extra work. I'd sooner put the £15 toward something I could enjoy immediately, which is why i'll be waiting for the inevitable duplicate doll ebay listings.

There's already a few popping up.

Just Play have created a cute, characterful doll. She feels fairly well made, she's fun and funky, but the blind box packaging? It adds nothing but frustration to the whole proceeding and makes a huge amount of WASTE.

I don't approve of these high price blind toys, they just seem astoundingly ... mean spirited I suppose. Disappointed kids aren't happy kids, and toys should make kids happy, not upset and feeling like they wasted their pocket money. It's not so bad when it's only a couple of quid, but £10-15 represents a good chunk of your standard kid's pocket money. It's not an occassional "yeah you were good today" little treat, it's not a small little indulgence, it's a proper "toy" expense and when I can buy a Fashionista for £12 and know exactly what i'm getting? Why would I gamble a similar amount on a complete mystery? For the same price you could get a Shoppies doll (which are about the same size, incidentally) or an Enchantamal or something.
The Hairdorables are cute, but they are NOT worth the stress of trying to find the exact one you or your kid WANTS/NEEDS/DESIRES and sure as heck not worth the tears of opening your third or fourth sodding duplicate.

Research into whether the codes help at all continues.

In the meantime, i'm watching ebay for a Harmony.