I never know what to put before the cut.
It's hard to write a preamble you know?
Anyway, these arrived at last.
Amazon screwed up my preorder AGAIN. See, you'd expect with a preorder, and indeed literally every other shop does it this way, that when stock came in they'd immediately package up the preorders and prep them to dispatch.
Oh no, not Amazon. That'd be waaaaay too efficient.
Instead what they do is put ALL the stock into regular sales online and then a week later go "oops, that's right, we owe you a preorder" and dispatch at their leisure.
So these girls came into stock on amazon on the 15th. They didn't actually dispatch to me till the 21st. I would have gotten them quicker had I NOT preordered. How's that for fuckery?
So yeah, yet again, Amazon fucking suck.
-_-
So the boxes are big chunky boxes and very colourful. They look nice, but they also have that bullshit "6 surprises!" crap on them which is 1: a complete fucking LIE and 2: pointless extra packaging.
these boxes could be HALF this damn size if they stopped the fake blind box shit.
The back of the box has the 6 dolls in the line. I was gonna get Bella too but I decided at £25 each it was getting a bit steep.
so they claim these are a "fully poseable fashion doll" so let's see if they pass those two tests. ARE they a fashion doll? As in, can they be redressed easily and is their outfit designed to be removed? and are they actually poseable?
Let's find out!
The box opens much like the smaller doll boxes. That whole hinged section is redundant if they just packaged the sodding doll with their SHOES ON THEIR FUCKING FEET.
Sorry, sorry, deep breaths... just.. these artificial blind bag dolls are really starting to rile me.
Anyway, as with the smaller dolls there's a cardboard diorama thing. In this case it's a runway.
There's also a card that tells me Kali's hands are removable which is cool. I always like a doll with removable hands, it makes dressing so much easier.
The armwork is cute, though Kali's wrists look broken.
Bigger hair, still don't care. It's a cute tagline, but aside from Bella and Kali NONE of the girls in this collection really have any more hair than the regular dolls so... i'm confused.
The doll herself is in this little plastic coffin and in a super awkward pose. I'm hoping those bent, twisted legs don't cause problems once she's deboxed.
And then there's your standard Hairdorable numbered "mystery drawers"
there's 4 of them. So i'm gonna assume we've got shoes, an accessory, brush, stand and er... what else?
I could figure it out if I looked at the art but I can't be bothered.
At first I was pleasantly surprised by how "easy" it was to open the doll. It lulled me into a false sense of security.
You cut the tape at the back of the plastic bubble and the cover pulls away to let you draw the whole backing piece out with doll attached.
Unfortunately this was the ONLY easy part.
For whatever reason they decided to plastic tab her in every possible place. Her ankles, her waist, her wrists, her hair (twice) and her fucking NECK. Many of them are SO TIGHT you can't snip them on the back and have to instead awkwardly slide scissor blades under, pull, snip and hope you don't cut the doll.
the neck one was absolutely awful to snip as it was SO tight against her face I really struggled to get the blade under it.
I hurt my fingers.
It made me grumpy.
Thankfully, the plastic ties didn't seem to leave any indents or distortion in the doll. Phew.
She's made of fairly hard plastic except her hands with are squishy and pop off really nicely with a little tug and pop back on really easily.
They are infinitely easier to take off and put back on than Monster High for example, and feel fairly secure when they ARE in. I don't think they'll fall off that easily.
Her face paint is... interesting. She has very thin lips set in a smile and pixilated eyeshadow that's pink on one side and green on the other. I feel like her lips need filling out.
Kali's hair was the main reason I wanted her. You don't often get dolls with giant fro hair, especially not in fantasy colours.
Her hair is very very tightly curled fibre that I can't identify and it's dark and light purple. The front is tied up into a high pony to make the first part of her frohawk while the back is loose and relying on the texture to stick upright.
The sides of her head are flocked in a sort of acid green colour.
She uses a different head sculpt to the smaller dolls, which surprised me.
Her head is far more concave and honestly, reminds me of a zelf.
It's an odd design choice.
big Kali's head is REALLY wobbly and I don't know why. It's troubling.
Her outfit is two pieces. The under-dress is designed to look like a shirt and skirt but it's just one piece. The skirt part has a circuit pattern and a plastic frill at the bottom in transparent pink. The top is very thin white cotton with a little greenish yellow bow tie.
it has a few little picks in it already thanks to packaging tabs. *sigh*
Her grey sweater/jumper/hoodie thing is however absolutely wonderful. It's a boring as shit looking piece but then you touch it and it's soooo soft and padded and it feels so warm and cosy! I've never handled a doll jumper that's actually felt like a real jumper before, this thing genuinely feels like it'd be really warm. It's sort of fleecy and thick and i'm honestly surprised they got fabric like this to behave at such a small scale.
I really like her grey jumper thing.
Her body is interesting. When Hairmazing was annouced, I , like many others, assumed they'd just use the bodies from their OTHER fashion doll line, the Spirit Riding Free dolls.
But this is definitely NOT the spindly Spirit body.
this body reminds me a lot of Monster high. Those legs really do look Monster High, the really high heeled feet even down to the shape of the calves. The torso however, is really really short and squat with a bust joint that barely does jack shit.
Alongside MH and EAH you can see how short that body really IS. But also how similar those legs are.
Hairmazing however have substantially larger feet. Interesting.
The torso reminded me a bit of the Snapstars body (in this case the one my Yukko Chan head stole lol), certainly they seem to be of similar scales.
Hairmazing can fit into Monster High clothing and vice versa, which is nice to know.
Likewise Snapstars stuff is interchangeable.
Having removable hands definitely makes putting the Snapstars playsuit on far easier than it is to get on the damn snapstar doll.
So let's look at these "surprises" shall we?
Behind door one.... we have a purple plastic bag.
Containing some shoes.
Rather odd shoes. They're kinda twisted in shape with these odd cuffs that stick out at the back.
They have mismatched laces.
Behind door 2 is a... visor? thing?
It clips into her hair and sits, imo, a little too high. I also feel like it adds nothing to her overall look beyond making her look like a bookeeper.
Door 3 gives us... some sunglasses, or rather, blinders... and a belt made of soft squishy vinyl with a tablet and er.. folder.. thing... on it.
What IS it with these sunglasses with no lenses doll lines keep doing? they're fucking stupid.
Her belt is fine, though the bendy tablet is a bit wierd to me.
The final bag is the biggest and has a huge warning on it.
"keep away from children" isn't really the sort of thing you want to see on a CHILD'S TOY now is it? Especially not when the whole deboxing shit is part of the play experience (supposedly)
Inside is a gold brush.. or.. pick.. and a stand base and clip.
which raises the question, where the hell is the prop part for the stand?
I searched through all the bits, deconstructed the box even, no stand piece.
Hmmm... looks like that's missing then. Great.
Oh wait.. look, there it is! That grey plastic rod! Kali didn't have one of those at all!
Harmony's runway is different to Kali's. A cute touch but ultimately, what's the point?
Harmony is positioned even MORE awkwardly in her box than Kali was. It's left her with weak knees that can't straighten up.
Also, HOLY FUCKING SHIT the plastic tabs. In Harmony's case this was even more stressful because she has long hair, ALL her outfit pieces are thin fragile fabric and she has stockings on too, so every snip could be a potential disaster.
I hate this. HATE it.
I managed to snip most of them from the back on her but a few still required me to hold my breath and snip from the front.
What photographs don't capture is that Harmony's fishnets are actually metallic and shiny.
They are sewn to her plether hotpants and aren't a separate piece. They're also a bit baggy on her.
Her shirt has semi transparent sleeves and a satin-look bodice with some sort of plasticky fabric as the collar and cuffs.
Her blouse is longer at the back than the front which is cute, but it's not line so from the front you can see the white of the wrong side of the fabric.
She comes with green baggies with the same huge warning.
The big bag was first this time and contains her hat and stand pieces.
The stand feels flimsy. It's far too lightweight.
The hat is nice BUT it has a major design flaw. It will NOT stay on the doll's head and has absolutely NO manner of securing it. No elastic, no clip, nothing.
Harmony's makeup is interesting. Again she has very thin lips which is distracting and I think just emphasises her wierd zelf-like face.
Her eyeshadow is leopard print in blue with what I think are supposed to be cartoonish sparkles and there's a blue stripe under each eye.
She comes with a different brush to Kali.
This is a nice touch. Kali's brush is more of a hair pick which makes sense given her hair fibre. Harmony meanwhile gets a more traditional style doll brush.
Her earrings are FUCKING RIDICULOUS. I mean Kali's were big but these are absolutely perposterous.
She also gets a pair of blinder sunglasses, same mold, different colour. These ones have a metallic blue sheen to the front. So you can look shiny while being blind yeah?
Her shoes are platformed gold boots.
Now these presented a bit of a problem due to how theyr'e designed.
they don't have a solid slit down the back, instead the slit sort of stops mid way up so it's more like a little window. This makes tucking her baggy stockings into the boots way more tricky, and believe me, knee high boots with baggy stockings results in terrible sagging fishnets that look SHIT.
Those sunglasses do nothing for her, they look fucking stupid.
You could hang a grown man off those earrings.
The stand is USELESS. Not only is it too light, the waist piece is far too big for the doll so she just flops about in it. And because Harmony's knees won't straighten fully, she keeps flopping forward out of the stand, rendering the stand utterly pointless.
Now, I kinda understand the gappy waist clip so it won't damage the fabric but it would only work if there was some sort of lip to keep the feet in place or some sort of ankle brace to force her to stand up straight.
Overall, getting the stand to actually work as a stand involves far more effort than it's worth.
Alongside her smaller counterpart the wierd concave head is very obvious.
Particularly not one that's part of an awkwardly wide hinged box.
Hairmazing are an interesting reinterpretation of the smaller Hairdorables, though I feel like the smaller dolls maybe have a little more personality to their faces.
At the end I was left with this trash and a big ol pile of plastic tabs and shit on the carpet that I had to sweep up.
and I just.. it makes me angry. Becuase it's SO wasteful. The boxs aren't reusable, they're too piecey and you remove large chunks of them to open the damn things.
They're not sturdy enough to be classed as a "doll storage container" which I will give to the LOL OMG boxes, at least most of those can be put back together (well the original series could, the later ones not so much).
All the plastic bags are absolutely redundant. Why the hell couldn't they package the doll wearing her shoes and belt? Why hide them in a pointless extra section and cover them in plastic? it's just WASTE. waste waste waste.
I'm tired of toy companies pulling this shit.
they aren't surprises if they're part of the doll's default fucking design. They aren't surprises if they're pictured on the front of the goddamn fucking box. They aren't surprises if they're a brush or a stand or a goddamn sticker.
STOP THIS BULLSHIT and just make normal goddamn fucking fashion dolls assholes!
ARGHHH
I mean think about it. These boxes would be HALF the size without the "surprise" element and wouldn't in any way be negatively impacted by the loss of more shit to debox.
A kid could debox and immediately play, rather than have to open all this other shit to put it all together.
Your trash wouldn't be piled high with plastic.
they'd cost less because there would be less tat.
The "surprise" bags add absolutely nothing to the experience. You KNOW what shoes Kali will get, they're right there in the picture. You KNOW she has a belt. you KNOW she has a stand.
You KNOW harmony has a hat.
So why hide them? Why bother? Just... what is the point?
what excitement does that add? All it does is make deboxing slower and messier.
So, how do I feel about the dolls themselves?
I'm torn.
I like a lot about them. Their bodies are decent and they pose about as well as a Monster High doll. Their hands pop off and on for easy redressing which I like. Their shoes are very soft and easy to put on and take off again. Their earrings are easy to put in as well.
Their hair is the same quality as their smaller dolls and absolutely fine.
the facepaint is clean and precise without any obvious defects.
There's no obvious marbling to the dark plastic either which is more than I can say for a lot of Mattel stuff of late.
Kali's flocked sides are a little bit messily done and I don't think her hair will stand up to play but I appreciate the attempt.
I'm not sure about the wierd eyeshadow decorations, i find them a bit distracting, especially Kali's mismatched pixels.
I also wish they had wider more shapely lips, the narrow mouths are a bit wierdly alien looking especially paired with their bizarre concave faces.
The clothing is hit and miss. Kali's dress feels a bit fragile in places. The skirt is fine but the fabric of the top piece is very very thin and feels like it'll easily tear and snag. Her jumper however is beautiful.
Likewise Harmony's clothing is well sewn but it's all made of VERY fragile feeling fabric. Her top feels flimsy, her shorts even more so and her stockings don't fit her legs correctly and bag if you don't tuck them into her boots carefully.
Also her hat won't stay on her head unless you wrap an elastic band around it and that level of disregard for detail pisses me off.
If you're gonna make a doll hat, you better damn well make sure the doll can WEAR IT.
For £25 these feel overpriced, like you're paying a lot for a gimmick you don't even want.
I'd say in the current market, £20 is probably fairer.
The QC is mostly good, though I seem to have gotten a dud with Kali. Her head is wobbly and she's missing a crucial piece of her stand.
Harmony can't straighten her legs properly because of how she was positioned in the box distorting the plastic.
These are all things that would be fairly easy fixes by the manufacturer if they cared. The fact is, the boxes are too short for the dolls so they have to be packaged all scrunched up and that's utterly bizarre. Why not just make the box a few cm taller? I don't get it.
It's like they designed the box and then went "oh fuck, we gotta fit the doll in this!"
Morons.
I like this pair, but I don't think i'll get Bella at full price. I don't think they're worth full price.
I appreciate the interesting funky hairstyles a lot of the line have, I like the brightly coloured hair and I enjoy a lot of the clothing pieces which honestly look really nice, but I just don't think these dolls are really very well suited to play. Least, their current design isn't.
the oversized earrings will break.
the fragile clothing will tear.
The smaller dolls feel like a toy you can actually play with (in fact, my kids often DO play with my Hairdorables) while these Hairmazing feel far more like something you only really want to give to a much older child who won't redress it or do much with it beyond very gentle play.
and I don't see the point there.
YES monster high was fragile (the knees especially) but their clothing was designed well and was robust enough to be taken on and off repeatedly without damaging it.
I don't feel like the Hairmazing outfits could manage that. I was already getting nervous about Kali's dress when I was putting it on Clawdeen, I didn't even risk removing Harmony's clothes as I felt far too anxious about tearing her shorts as soon as I looked at them.
And it's a shame because Harmony's outfit especially LOOKS so damn cool. I just wish they'd picked fabrics that were a bit more robust, a bit tougher, a bit less shit so she could share her cool wardrobe with other dolls.
If they go on sale I might pick up a couple of the others but I certainly don't think they're worth full price.
And now I have to go contact the company about that missing stand. *sigh* i'm not sure I can even be arsed because the stands are so shit.
7 wobbly heads out of 10. They're a little above average for being something new and for having decently constructed bodies.
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