Yet another "I bought some stuff but didn't think it was enough for a whole devoted review" post.
As always Ebay is a cruel temptress and I have poor impulse control.
So let's talk about that bundle I bought earlier in the month first.
You can read about that here
I ended up selling on a lot of the stuff in it as I had intended but a couple of dolls got to stay.
Supercool Sindy didn't need much beyond a quick clean and her hair restyled, though it turned out her hair was more of a pain in the arse than I expected it to be. It's really wierdly rooted with those front pigtails and has no obvious thatched parting so it's quite awkward. I managed to find someone who had a mint one they could take photos of the hair from the front, back and top so I could work it out.
Her fringe doesn't want to stay flat which is annoying.
Old Scarface needed a lot of work. Her hair is a wreck and she'll need rerooting at some point but honestly i'm nervous to do it because her head is quite hard and she's already so damaged.
For her splits I first used some superglue to try to force them to stick back together but the one on her face and the big one at the back of her head didn't want to stay stuck. The one at the back split open again when I put her head back on her body and the face one had a big gap and gouged out of it anyway. Ouch.
I tried a few options. I first tried to fill it in with some glue but that didn't help. I tried to make acetone goop but that failed. Eventually I went to my first idea which was to mix up some white milliput and sorta skim plaster the crack and then paint it the right colour afterwards.
She'll always have a scar, the damage was just too much to complete conceal but it's a lot better than it was. At least it's not a gaping open wound now.
I gave her some freckles to hide the paint but also to sorta disguise a few other scratches and issues on her face.
She's sorta rocking this BTS shirt huh?
I'm not totally sure which Hasbro Sindy she is, i'm assuming she's one of the budget ones, probably "my first sindy" judging by her hard solid body and dark complexion. I wonder how she'd look as a brunette.
but it'll be a while before I work up the courage to try to reroot this head. It's hard as hell which is why it split in the first place. there's NO give at all.
thing is, i'm a sucker for tlc dolls I know I can't sell. I feel so bad for them they usually end up staying.
Anna Moore here, to remind you, had a head FULL of black ink. She spent a week in the airing cupboard with a lot of zit cream in there.
this is after 2 applications. I think one more would remove all of it but I think it's good enough for now.
I've found that HEAT works a lot better than sunlight for this stuff so I gave up on sunny windows and now just stick the dolls straight into the airing cupboard for a week or so and take them out when I remember, rinse the dried stuff off, apply new stuff and stick em back in there. It seems to work a lot faster in the dark warm cupboard than it ever did on the windowsill so i'm thinking it's not UV light that activates the peroxide effect but rather warmth.
go figure.
I had wanted one of these giant Rainbow Surprise Slime dolls for a while but couldn't justify the bullshit £50 price, especially not for a blind bag like.. wtf?
As it turns out, MGA have rereleased them without the blind gimmick and rebranded them "rainbow high" but they're still £50 each and i'm like "yeah no".
So I managed to find two of them for £15 each secondhand without their slime crap and was all "yes!"
You can see how fricken huge they are.
I think this girl is called Amythest Raye or something. Her hair is a bit messed up but she's gorgeous. She has a little lip rub.
Unlike the Rainbow High dolls, who seem to use a very similar face sculpt, the Rainbow Surprise girls have painted eyes which I actually think I prefer because they look less dead eyed.
Amythest's hair is multitonal with multiple purples and silver and it's SO SOFT like holy crap, I can't stop touching it. I'm not a hair play kinda person but these dolls have such soft silky hair I couldn't stop combing it and playing with it. It's just so tactile and pleasant.
Rainbow girl has really soft hair as well. Her lips are shinier and her eyebrows are painted in such a way that they honestly look hand painted with individual little hair strands. The paint work on these is absolutely gorgeous.
Her hair is rainbow so has 7 different colours in it. It's blue, purple, green, red, pink, orange and yellow. not a proper rainbow but close enough.
They have MASSIVE heads (her head is bigger than my damn hand!) and fairly light hard plastic bodies. The body shape is slightly pear shaped, much like the Rainbow High dolls and has painted panties.
There are tattoo decals on both arms. Not all the Rainbow Surprise girls have tattoos but both of these girls do.
They're on tattoo/slide paper so in some lights you can see the clear part of the decal.
The tattoos are random. There's food and rainbows and puking bears and... yeah it's bizarre.
There IS a problem with these decals, specifically in relation to Rainbow's plastic jacket. They're slightly tacky and as a result they stick to the plastic jacket meaning when you remove the jacket you risk pulling the tattoo decals off in the process. When I got her jacket off her arms were really sticky and I had to wipe them down.
Amythest doesn't have this issue, presumably because she has a sleeveless vest so her decals aren't reacting with anything.
But yeah, worth being aware of.
They have high heeled feet and very simple jointing. Hip, shoulder, neck. That's all you get. Which is pretty minimal for the price point don't you think?
Here's Rainbow alongside a Endless Hair Kingdom Barbie (she's 1/4 scale, or close to. She's about 40cm tall)
The Rainbow Surprise dolls have a "slime" gimmick which means their shoes have a snap off sole you can fill with goo if you want (I think it'd look quite cute full of beads or glitter or confetti or something personally) and their clothes have little zip locks so you're supposed to put slime in those too (ew, who wants to wear bags of slime?)
I actually couldn't get any of the zip locks to open so either i'm dumb or there's a real knack to doing it.
either way, I have no intention of filling her skirt and jacket with sticky shit so whatever.
I also finally got my preorder for Rainbow High Sunny in. she has a quite saturated brown complexion which I really like, it contrasts beautifully with her yellow clothing and hair.
The back of her jacket has a cute little sun and moon motif, it's adorable.
Her hair has a lot of gunk in the front of it which i haven't yet rinsed out. It makes it super crunchy and I don't like it.
Her secondary outfit I haven't done anything with yet. I liked this outfit more.
Husband liked the Rainbow High dolls I had so he ended up buying Ruby for himself.
so yes, this isn't my doll and I have zero responsibility for her outfit hahah.
She's VERY pale and her hair has a lot of shit in it. It's a beautiful colour though.
But what I thought was really interesting about Ruby is how they attached her hat. Hats falling off dolls is a big issue both for collectors and during play so this I feel is rather ingenious. Basically, Ruby has a hole in her head and the hat has a peg that slots into the hole, locking the hat nice and solidly on her head. it's rather like how Liv and Snap Stars wigs attach.
She has enough hair you can comb it over the hole when she's not wearing her hat and won't notice it but honestly I think it's a brilliant idea to keep the damn thing on her big fat head.
I'm gonna fully admit that while I know who BTS are, I don't know much about them beyond "they were big with kids and wrote some songs which from listening on Youtube, aint' half bad".
But, when these came out there was excitement about the prospect of not one, not two, but SEVEN brand new asian face sculpts. Of course Mattel fucked it up with terrible low quality UV printing but even so, ethnically diverse dolls, especially boy dolls are a bloody rarity.
So when I noticed Home Bargains had the 7 pack for £12 I couldn't resist grabbing it.
I don't know who each of these guys are, i'm sorry. The box doesn't bother to tell you either.
These outfits are just flat out hideous but I think that was the point.
Yellow and black suit boy has a pretty face. Blonde boy in the poppy suit is cute too.
redhead isn't actually a redhead, his hair is interesting. It's brown with sort of pinkish red strands. It photographs as quite a vivid red but it's not.
likewise the boy beside him looks like his hair is black but it's actually streaked with a pale blueish green that matches his suit.
I was surprised to learn that the tie on the crazy african inspired print suit is actually a separate piece.
Why?
the shirts are attached to the jackets, they're just a front flap piece with the exception of the redheaded boy who has a white tee under his jacket and for some reason his shirt is a separate piece (bewildering)
The hoodie on Poppy Suit (I feel bad I don't know their names hahaha) has no easy way to remove it, there's no velcro up the back of the jacket so you have to yank it over his head like a real hoodie. It's a bit wierd.
there's also only 2 shoe sculpts here. 2 boys have white sneakers and the other 5 have white high tops. Wierd.
These are reboot Monster High bodies!
Which is a bizzare choice for human dolls, especially human dolls based on REAL people.
Those long limbs are so gangly and unnatural.
And because this is reboot MH, the hands don't come off. Least I couldn't get them off. *sigh* Mattel...
In the dim light of evening I thought "oh, maybe the uv printing isn't as bad as the single pack dolls I saw in stores who looked grainy as shit" but in the stark light of day it's clear that no, they are just as grainy and low resolution.
you can see the pixelated effect around the eyes and especially on the lips right?
now, given Moose have done two lines with UV printing now and both of them you have to look really close to see the grainy spottiness, this suggests that Mattel are using really low resolution shit to print these faces. you gotta ask WHY? I mean Mattel is huge, they clearly have the money to do this at a better resolution, but they don't care enough to do so. So you end up with dolls with grainy pixelated faces who look unifnished and wierd.
which is a pity because without the graininess this isn't a terrible face. It's a bit blank and soulless but it's a perfectly servicable playline faceup.
I decided to see if they looked better redressed and had a go at removing one of the faces to see how they were to repaint.
Now, i'm not great at repainting small little fashion dolls so my work is a bit sloppy but at the same time, it's a hell of a lot less grainy than the factory work.
I haven't decided yet whether i'll repaint the other ones i'm keeping (I'm not keeping all 7) or whether i'll just overpaint their factory paint to make it less grainy and shitty looking.
Part of me likes the idea of repainting them purely to turn them into something else and not a celebrity doll as I find owning tiny likenesses of real people a little bit creepy, especially when i'm not a fan of those people, but at the same time there's a certain appeal to having some factory examples of Mattel's non white dolls.
I dunno. We'll see what happens.
I definitely need to practice more on painting at this teensy tiny scale though. It's SO SMALL and I have big fat stupid hands. *sob*
the one last thing I got was this girl. The local kids charity shop reopened at long last and have a lot of dolls in their bins. This is one of the 10/10/10 Bratz and if i'm honest? for all the problems the 2010 Bratz had, I always preferred that era's facepaint to the older Bratz. I like the smokey eyes and the partially open mouth. I think it gives them some personality and definition in a face mold that's otherwise extremely blank.
She isn't complete, those aren't actually her original shoes and she's lost her grey knit socks (10/10/10 was characterised by a sea of grey knit, like holy crap so much of it) but she's in pretty good nick considering. These dolls have shitty nylon hair which is prone to frizzing and often ends up cut short because it was so hard to manage. Her hair is her original length and not too bad.
The one unfortunate thing about the charity shop since they reopened is that they've hiked all their prices up massively. it now means that dolls are generally far too expensive to be worth buying unless they're quite special so I can see that meaning far less impulse charity shop buys for me.
I dunno why they decided it was a good idea to price their dolls at £4-5 each, it seems pretty stupid to me but we'll see how long that lasts.
People won't buy if they're too expensive.
But this girl was "special" enough for me to want. I haven't been able to buy dolls from charity shops in so long and the 2010 Bratz are my favourite era of Bratz. I like their bodies, I like their eyes, I like their funky outfits. I just wish they'd used better hair for them because damn this nylon is nasty.
I gotta go stroke the Rainbow Surprise dolls for a bit to get the ick feeling to go away hahaha.
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