Basaak and Jecci Five - Blythe clones and face carving FUN

This title makes me sound like a psychopath bwhaha.

A local lady was selling some Blythe clones/knockoffs for stupidly cheap.
I've been considering trying my hand at customising those big headed freaky things for years but was always put off by how expensive they were and how much WORK making them NOT look terrifying actually takes (sanding, carving, the whole shebang)
but for the price I figured if I messed up, no biggy you know? I could practice some fairly difficult skills (carving a doll's face) without worrying about destroying something worth £££

So I got 2.



The lady had like 6 of them, all blank, all very random. I don't know WHY, she wasn't very talkative and didn't seem very interested in discussing what her plans had been for them.
Which is a shame because I always like meeting doll people locally.
Ahh well.

Anyway,

 (NOT my photo)

I admit, I always thought Blythe and similar dolls were really fricken ugly. Giant shiny heads, tiny little spindle bodies, massive staaaaring eyes and no eyebrows, I mean, they are just plain WIERD to me and for years I couldn't understand their appeal.

till I saw what a lot of people actually DO with them. Not just repainting them but full on carving their faces to give them cuter expressions and personality and just.. WOW.

Suddenly it made sense to me. I mean I still don't GET factory perfect Blythes, I still think they're fugly (no offense to those who like em) but I have to admit, those custom ones were damn cute.

Also over the years i've slowly become more and more used to giant headed dolls with teensy bodies. Makies, Pullip, La Dee Da, even Hairdorables have an element of the Lollypop head going on.
As my eye has become accustomed to the big head look the giant noggin of the Blythe didn't look quite so shocking anymore.

I mean don't get me wrong, these things have MASSIVE heads, way bigger than any other doll i've ever handled compared to their bodies. But it's less startling when you're accustomed to Makies and Pullips you know?

Anyway,

I picked out the brunette and the white haired girl because the Brunette looked to have a pretty versatile hair colour and style and the white haired girl looked completely different and I thought was possibly an Icy (a Blythe knockoff) rather than a direct clone.

As it turns out, the white haired girl is actually a Jecci Five doll, another Blythe knockoff and apparently a fairly good quality one at that.

The others are unmarked but I believe they're Basaak dolls, which are very much CLONES.

I don't know how different their faces are to legit Blythes having never handled or seen a legit blythe in the flesh, but unlike the Jecci they're clearly supposed to look so much like a Blythe as to be easily mistaken for a legitimate one.

I knew these were clones going in because nobody sells legit blythes for next to nothing, but I admit I actually was surprised by how decent feeling the basaak IS.

Both of them are heavy as heck because their fat heads weigh a tonne. Both have thickly rooted very soft hair.
Jecci Five has a kinda rubbery body while Basaak has a quite firm body that's actually way easier to dress. Neither of them feel overly flimsy or cheap, which surprised me as I genuinely did expect the Basaak particularly to feel well.. like a clone.

I mean i've had legit factory dolls from other companies (cough cough MGA, Mattel, Hasbro... cough) that felt way cheapier and shittier.

Both of them have pretty cheap eyechips honestly. And in some pretty bizarro colours.

Jecci has purple, pink, orange and uh... ugly piss yellow. Whut?
Basaak has fluro green, fluro blue, brown and terrifying pink (WHY???)
None of them have much depth to them, they're all kinda flat and too bright and a bit odd.

Jecci also has really rubbery legs so the weight of her fat head causes her ankles to distort.

Whoops?

I can't get over how SHINY these dolls are. And I looked it up, legit Blythes are also insanely horribly grossly shiny.

Husband said they looked "greasy"
Nice.

Like Pullips, their giant heads are molded in two parts and come apart with screws at the back.

Jecci has three screws, Basaak had two just at the bottom.

inside the head is a bit terrifying. The hair is rooted into a rubbery scalp thing which is held in place with a screw on the Jecci and just held in with a hard ring of plastic and the pressure of the head pieces on the Basaak. Jecci also had a couple of patches of glue that needed peeling. It wasn't too difficult to remove her scalp though.

Both have eyemechs like this though. Four different eye colours in three different positions. Two facing forward and one looking left, one looking right.

I kinda appreciate the variation on glance there. Side glance on dolls like this is always WAY less creepy to me.

The mechanism is changed by yanking the cord and wow, it actually takes quite a lot of pressure. The eyes close and then reopen a new colour with a horrible loud cracking sound.
It's.... rather disconcerting.
there's a spring involved as well which seems to hold the eyelids open? I think? It clips into the upper toggle of the mechanism and into the backplate of the head. 

Jecci's insides are far more complicated in terms of the latches at the sides of the face plate which hold the two sides of the head in place while you put the screws in. It means her head is waaaaay harder to open up and involves quite a lot of pressure.

Basaak meanwhile as soon as you undo the screws her head flops open.

I didn't get pictures of the Basaak head open, I was too eager to get drilling. <_<

but opening her head made her clone-ness far more obvious. Her head was FULL of cut hair (presumably from where her bangs were cut) and there was a burn in her scalp which I can't quite figure out.

I followed a few online tutorials for how to get the damn head and mech out. It wasn't easy. Jecci's eyemech came out a LOT easier than Basaak's though. You have to sort of push the sides of the face outward while also pushing the mech downward so it unclips and the Jecci face plate has more give to it than the Basaak which was a two man job and hurt both our fingers in the process.
Yeouch.

It's remarkable actually how much brute strength is actually required to take a Blythe-like doll apart. So many times I thought I was going to break something! 

Once you get the mech out there's several pieces that need to be removed to get the eyelids removed so they can be painted if you so desire.

It's a bit of a pain.

seriously my fingers HURT.

But this is Jecci's face plate all ready for sanding.

I wouldn't call her overly pretty that's for sure. She has an okay nose but very little filtrum (it's very very shallow) and duck lips. What the heck is with the duck lips? She also has a SUPER fat face. 

So I sanded it with my 600-800 grit sandpaper which got the shine off beautifully and then got out my dremel and went a bit mad scientist bwhahah.

Jecci didn't need that much done. Her filtrum I wanted to make a little more obvious and extend it so it gave her upper lip some definition (she has ZERO definition to that upper lip, it just juts out like a beak). I decided to also make her nostrils a little deeper and then tried to sort out the lip situation.

My dremel slipped and I took a chunk out of her cheek I couldn't sand out. DAMNIT.

Oh well.

I extended the edges of her lips into a sort of smile (it's very subtle), reduced the depth of her lower lip a bit, drilled the heck outta the parting between her lips so it looked a bit more natural but then I decided i'd had enough and couldn't really get her lips looking any less wierd to my eye without getting a bit too brave.

Her lips gave me a lot of trouble and I am still not happy with them. I like the outer shape but the wierd part in them I couldn't get to look right no matter what I did. I ended up just filling it in and hiding it.
But i'm not too happy with how grainy my pencils and blush work is. Nghh.

For some reason when I put her eyemech back together it resulted in her eyelids always drooping slightly more than they did previously, though I think they kinda work to give her personality.

I didn't end up sanding and painting her eyelids because I couldn't be bothered. I'd already taken apart the Basaak's eyemech and it was painful and awkward to do and put back together again so I decided to just leave Jecci's eyelids blank.

I can always go back and do them properly later.

I liked her purple eyes so I gave her purple lips to tie into that and went with a fairly simple faceup for her.
I noted that most Pullips, even custom ones, seldom have painted lashes. Which is interesting. So that's what I went with.

I turned her gouged cheek into a beauty mark. It hides the gouge well.

Her wig/scalp has SO MUCH hair though, it gets tangled in her lashes and it's a freaking pain in the arse.

It has a tendency to cling to ANYTHING nearby.

She can't actually stand even in her shoes because her ankles are SO SQUISHY and her head is too heavy.
it's kinda annoying actually.

I know people often rebody these dolls onto jointed bodies like the Pure Nemo ones but i'm stingy and don't happen to have any short stocky bodies laying around. Barbie scale bodies are a bit too elongated and make the lollypop head look even wierder to my eye.

Still, Jecci went from blank faced duck lipped wierdo to grumpy vampire girl.

I'm not sure I LIKE her, but I won't deny she has attitude.

but her face is SO ROUND and her chin region so ill defined. I find it a bit odd.

 Basaak needed a lot more done and was actually the first one I tackled.

Don't be fooled, the nostrils you see in this photo are effectively DRAWN on in pencil. For whatever reason the sculpt has no filtrum, no nostrils, no upper lip definition and is just a bit... wierdly blank and simple.


Nothing a scalple, a dremel and more sandpaper can't fix! I hope.

She got nostrils, a filtrum to define her lip and I shaped her lip part to be a bit more natural. Lips don't just go straight across like a line, they have a little dip in the middle.

That done I slipped her eyes back in briefly and scribbled a rough idea of a face on her.

I thought she was already looking pretty cute.

I was going to give her dark lips but I ended up going with a dark red shade instead.

She stole Jecci's dress because the gothy look of it appealed to me.

I also sanded her neck because she had a molding flaw that resulted in this wierd line across her throat that looked like she'd been garotted. I mean it was WIERD.
I cut the excess plastic off and sanded it as smooth as I could.

Clearly the quality control on these fakes ain't great but I can't say i'm surprised. I'm more surprised she's not MORE shitty honestly.

Her bright blue eyes are SO blue

She stole one of my Journey Girl's bows which fits with the elastic tied a little. Problem is, Blythe style heads are SO FLATTENED that keeping bows actually ON is really hard. Seriously they have pancake-like profiles.

The green eyes are terrifying!

It took me so long to get her eyemech back together. I wanted to replace her lashes because they're a bit shit but they're fused between two pieces of plastic that make up her eyelids and I couldn't figure out how to get them OUT.

This one I DID paint the eyelids of, not that you can see them in photos. They're black.

The brown eyes are for sure my favourite.

Both girls got set up on my dresser for the time being.

This picture highlights how ROUND and moon-like Jecci's face is. I swear her head is somehow LARGER than the Basaak. it's so wierd.

The wig hides Basaak's eyebrows. She has them! Honest!

I just didn't snap a picture before I rammed her head back together. Whoops.

So, final thoughts? Well ordinarily I wouldn't go out of my way to buy a knockoff doll like Basaak but I really do like how she came out.
I can see carving up these heads being really addictive honestly. Their simplicity of molding and rather thick plastic does make them pretty great canvases for this sort of thing.

Would I feel okay carving up a legit blythe? I dunno, I think i'd feel super guilty. They're not exactly mass produced so it's not quite like a Barbie where there's millions just like her. I don't know what the production numbers of Blythe are but I suspect they're a little more like pullip and in the hundreds or thousands at most rather than millions. Though i do wonder why Takara don't do what Groove did and sell blank sets for customisation. I mean it'd remove the guilt of destroying a limited run legit doll while still meaning you weren't giving money to counterfeiters.
They don't right? Least I couldn't find any when I did a google search.

Man, well priced legit blanks for custom would KILL that bootleg market so fast.

But I don't want to get too much into the politics of clones and bootlegs, because that's a big complicated and volatile argument and my stance is very much "wherever possible legit is the way to go, go legit, support the company who produced the thing you love."

Much as I love shitty retro clones, what I love is dolls like Jecci Five who are clearly inspired BY a big name doll but skirt the copyright just enough to be a knockoff rather than an outright copy. They're creative and amusing and often quite interesting.

I prefer the Basaak body to the Jecci Five one though, her legs are very firm plastic so she stands well and getting socks or pants on is really easy. Jecci on the other hand has rubbery legs that are slightly tacky like old barbie doll legs so getting pants or socks on is really awkward and her head is so heavy it causes her ankles to distort when she stands.
I'm pretty sure she has wider shoulders too. Which look a bit odd to me, they remind me of Barbie's massive linebacker shoulders from her older body. I always hated those broad shoulders on barbie, they look wierd.

Speaking of clothes, the dress that came on Jecci? It's really really damn nicely made. I really love this dress.

Both of them really could do with better eyechips, their defaults are really cheap looking.

i'm impressed by their hair though, I really did expect shitty frizzy nylon but it's so soft and nice to run your fingers through. Surprised me.

I don't know much about the prices of Jecci Five dolls, i found one on Ali Express for about £30 that looked like the one I have (even down to the dress) but i'm not sure you can't get them cheaper.
As for Basaak, well i've never actually looked and I think if you're in the market for a Blythe you should probably, in all good concience, not go for the bootleg but try to get a hold of a legitimate one that needs tlc anyway.
that may be easier said than done though, as I don't honestly know the market.

Still, the factory Blythes I see on Ebay (which are supposedly cobbled together from B grade parts by factory workers so aren't really legit) aren't exactly cheap and the Basaak's aren't THAT much cheaper. A legit in box Blythe? Ouch.. just.. ouch. They're comparable to Pullip in price and I can't justify a new Pullip either lol. I'd rather buy a bjd. (seriously I can get a cheaper company bjd for a similar price to a stock Pullip or Blythe and that's where my preference lies. I think it's the customisation aspect. Though i've been tempted by the Pullip Make It Own kits in the past... )


Unless I find another crazy deal like this one I can't see me adding any more to my collection. They're interesting for sure and I had fun carving them up (lol macabre) but I don't really think the world of Blythe is for me. I still think they have WIERD heads and strange faces. And I don't get the no eyebrows thing, what the hell?

So no, I can't see a legit Blythe joining my family anytime soon. Sorry Takara.

My two girls need names of course, and will at some point probably get redone. I'm sure there's still a lot of skills these two big headed wierdos can help me learn. Good dremel control being one of them.