It's clearance time!

 That's right, after weeks of boring nothing newness, it's finally time. Reset looms, which means stores are clearing old stock in preparation.

Which means bargains to be had! 

So of course I couldn't resist. I've been waiting for a few things to go onto clearance and while I didn't buy everything I wanted because I decided to have SOME restraint, I did get a lot of new goodies. Ahem. 

So while I wait for new stock to hit (impatiently I may add, because damnit it's frustrating when the US gets stuff literally months before the uk does. -_- ) i'm consoling myself with cheap last season stock heh.

I've been waiting for the LOL OMG dolls to come down in price and quite a few of them have now.

That means remix, dance dance dance and all the lines that came before are ALL on clearance now horah!

Amazon had warehouse deals on top of clearance so I picked up the two Dance girls I was wanting.

Virtuelle was missing her earrings which is frustrating. This is the third or fourth time i've had an OMG arrive missing small parts and of course, there's no point calling MGA because they give zero shits and just tell you "return it" which is a pain in the butt and there's no guarentee you'll not have a doll with more problems (and in the case of a warehouse deal, you take what you get because they can't give you a replacement anyway).

thankfully I happened to have some spare earrings and honestly I think they look better than the yellow plastic earrings she was meant to have. 

I took off her wierd long pants because they just looked strange to me and was quite pleased to find that underneath them she has interesting asymetrical shorts and these awesome socks.

Why would you hide those!?? 

Her jacket sleeves feel gross, they're crunchy like a plastic shopping bag. It's wierd and unpleasant. The jacket LOOKS cool but it's super gross to touch because it makes crinkly noises which I don't like. 

She is SUPER dark skinned, I think she may be the darkest skinned OMG yet. Which is awesome. It really helps her pink hair "pop" 

Her hair is those twisted strands they used for a few of their previous dolls but it's a deep pink with some pale pink streaks braided in. 

Her visor is rubbish. It's made of some sort of thin plasticky fabric instead of being solid molded plastic like I expected which means it's distorted in the packaging but also it doesn't actually FIT. The band seems like it's too wide and the actual visor is too long so it covers her whole face and just gets in the way. I hate it. They could have managed it a lot better. 

She came with a blacklight but it seems like only her makeup and hair light up under it which is something a lot of the dolls who do NOT come with blacklights do when you shine one on them anyway. I couldn't find any hidden secrets. 

and bewilderingly, she also came with THREE stand clips. One wider one and two standard ones. What? The instructions say nothing about this or what they're for. I'm so confused. 

Major Lady was the other Dance girl I really wanted. I'm not totally sure about the orange shoes, I feel like they should have been silver and tied more in with her cape but what do I know? 

Like virtuelle she came with three stand clips (huh?) and a blacklight. UNLIKE virtuelle, her blue eye has a secret lightening bolt in it when you shine the blacklight on her face which is neat.

Her cape has elastic bands inside which you slide over her arms so the cape moves with her arms, a bit like the Bratzilla capes but instead of going around the wrists these ones go around the upper arm. The Bratzillaz ones worked better for swishy poses I have to say.

Her cape is made of a sort of ribbed stretch fabric with a VERY stiff collar. There's a lightning bolt on the back.

She has glittery lips, mismatched eyes (one is green, the other a purplish blue) and sparkly eyebrows too (wierd).

Her hair is three different shades of orange I think. There's a sort of yellowy orange, a bright fanta orange and a darker orange. It's extremely soft and very pleasant to touch though it's a bit messy around the ponytail twist and she shed BADLY out of the box. 

Her earrings are mismatched, one is a lightning bolt, the other is stars. 

her glasses are stars and don't fit. This is a common issue with OMGs because they have no nose bridge, so there's nothing for the glasses to rest on and as a result they just slip down the face. 

I prefer the way these two were packaged. As slightly cheaper dolls they came with less outfit pieces (no bag, no necklace or bracelet) but they also come mostly dressed in the box with just their outer piece (jacket/cape) in the garment bag and their accessories (earrings, glasses, belt) in the hatbox. They don't come with a shoe box as they're packaged already wearing their shoes. But this also means a smaller box and more importantly, a box that opens like a drawer so you slide the whole box out of the outer shell which means it can be REUSED as a box to store extra bits. 

Which is good because they also have a plastic lenticular kinda images (I think they're actually simple barrier grid animations which I don't think HAVE a fancy name) with the black lines where you pull a tab and the image seems to move. This is cool and all, but it means the box has a big plastic piece that you'd have to cut out in order to recycle which is a pain in the arse. 

so being able to reuse them makes me less cranky about it. 

This though was my biggest bargain. Smyths had listed the Remix 2 pack for £20!?? (it's back up to £25 now so hmm) and i'd been umming and ahhing over whether I liked this set or not but decided for that price it was worth a look.

The box is fricken huge and really quite heavy. I appreciate they put a handle on the top so you could carry the damn thing home but damn it's a big box. Honestly OMG just have such silly big boxes, even a two pack should be like half this size but I suppose giant boxes look more deluxe and fancy huh? *eyeroll*

Being Remix dolls they come with the stupid not actually records and just plastic bullshit. (see my review of the other remix dolls for my full rant about this)

For some reason Rocker Boi's is heart shaped, I don't understand why. I mean yes, I know novelty shaped records exist but why is his specifically a heart? It's wierd and random. 

Like the other remix dolls, all these actually do is sit on the button that triggers the music box inside the box. You don't need them to set the music off anyway, you can literally just press the button down and twist it and it sets off. 

I didn't bother playing both "sides" (it's a switch on the music box itself) because the 30 second poor quality snippet from "side a" was quite enough for me. 

Maybe kids enjoy poor quality grainy sounding 30 second soundbites of tacky music but I found it embarrassing. The shitty little speaker in the music box does it no favours and it being a short snippet played through a bad speaker just makes it painful to listen to. 

Rocker Boi's background is a red room with a lot of posters that i'm SURE are references i'm too old and uncool to recognise.

Punk Grrrl (damn that's awkward to type) has a blue backdrop and I at least recognise ONE of those posters! Nevermind the other toys, lol, cute. 

Interestingly, Punk Grrrl has a hatbox with ALL the accessories in it, while Rocker Boi has the magazine. It was a bit confusing because I opened punk grrrl first and was like "wtf? aren't these his glasses?"

He comes with a pair of tinted aviators which like most omg glasses, slip down his face. 

He also has a bracelet that falls off a lot because it's a soft floppy strip that coils around his wrist instead of being a ring (why? his hands pop off so why didn't they just make it a solid ring so it'd stay on?) and a scarf thing.

He also comes with a guitar. Unlike the four pack it's not electronic. It's cute though and his soft hands mean he can hold it fairly well if you position it juuust right.

he's an odd looking boy honestly. I mean we knew the boys would be baby faced because the girls are but when I first saw his leaked images I was shocked by how round and featureless his face really WAS. His head reminds me of a potato lol. 

Poor guy.

The very thick contour on his cheeks didn't help matters, it made his jaw look even less defined somehow so I wiped it with some acetone and it made quite a lot of difference to my eye. You can actually SEE his chin now, what little of it there is. 

I think he could have benefitted from a little "flick" to his eyeliner to make his eyes less vacant but I couldn't get a decent line when I attempted it so I gave up.

What I find quite interesting is that MGA elected for their first boy not only to give him pierced ears but also to make him long haired, which is rather ambitous. Usually first boys are a bit "safer" and more generic as toy companies like to claim boy dolls "don't sell". Rocker Boi is definitely rather different. 

His long hair is actually a very dark navy blue I think, with white streaks through it which in my doll are horribly frizzy at the ends and spaced so far apart that most of the time they just look like he's greying rather than it being a clear defined streak. Wierd. 

I can't help but feel like maybe red would have been better there, especially as his "little sister" has pink and black hair.

His body is... wierdly detailed compared to his head, much like the girls. He has molded nipples (lol) and a buldge in his painted underpants hahaha. 

His outfit isn't bad though. He wears a white tee that's constructed inside out so the ugly overlapping seams are on the outside rather than hidden on the inside. I assume this is to make the shirt look more grungy and "home made". It has song lyrics on the front and "louder louder louder" painted over the top. It's random. 

Over that he wears a denim vest with plether sleeves. The vest part has fraying edges to suggest again, a cobbled together frankengarment. The back of the vest has large patches sewn onto it which is pretty cool. It says "iron BB" and has a record.

His trousers are half black and white stripe, half red snakeskin print and made of stretchy fabric and his boots are mismatched with one laced fully and the other laced only half way up for... some reason. 

His hair is knee length which is pretty spectacular for a boy doll. It's side parted and extremely soft except for the frazzled white bits. 

His ankles are articulated which makes getting his shoes on and off really annoying and anxiety inducing. I don't know if his feet can pop off but when I gave them a firm pull they didn't budge so I stopped trying. Articulated ankles in boy dolls are because without them you can't get tight fitting trousers off their big flat feet.

Punk Grrrl came with her hair in three big coil braids (two strands twisted together to LOOK like plaits rather than actual plaits) but I found they stuck out wierdly and it annoyed me so I took them out. 

Her hair is three shades of blue. A bright electric blue, a sort of greenish blue and a deep navy. The sides of her head are both flocked in electric blue with a subtle leopard print pattern to emulate her little brother.

Her hair is styled with flat short bangs in two shades of blue and with two dark strands near her ears that were gelled to hell out of the box and even once the gel is removed, don't want to sit flat (I may have to steam set them)

Her makeup is kinda clownish to my eye. I think it's supposed to emulate more like... glam rock? but that's wierd as she's supposed to be a punk. But it definitely screams far more bands like Kiss to me than it does Punk. *shrug* 

She has these stripes around her lower eye which might be chunky lashes or might be eyeliner decoration, I don't really know. Above that she has this reddish flicked eyeshadow and similarly coloured lips (it's a sort of coral colour?) 

Her skintone is a pale brown which is quite common on the omgs. A tone I refer to as "ambiguously brown".

Her outfit is awesome though. I really like her outfit.

She wears a leopard print bralet thing with a fishnet mesh around the bottom of it and a criss cross harness strap across her chest. Over that she wears a jacket made of some sort of rubbery faux leather that's matte and quite thick. It's multicoloured with various things written on it. Luv Life, Punk's not dead, Iron BB etc.
The back panel has a heart inside a spiderweb.

She has this fantastic large spiked necklace choker thing and then a skirt that's right out of my teen years like omg. I'm pretty sure I OWNED a cyberkilt that looked rather like this lol. 

It's black at the front with decorative zippers and then the back is two different tartens. A white and standard red with deep pleats. It is very cool.

 

She also has a pair of red lace stockings, which is a little unusual as again, not something i'd associate with punk but they look cool. Then finally she has some paradoxically pink shoes which match absolutely nothing else. I think they'd have looked better blue personally.

She comes with a bass with a chain strap on it. I always liked that MGA made fairly realistic instruments, unlike Mattel who's guitars often only have 4 or 5 strings, MGA has always made the effort to distinguish between a bass and a guitar which I appreciate. 

Another cool detail about the bass is that each of the tuning pegs are in a different position which i've never seen on a doll instrument before and adds a touch of realism to the whole thing. 

I'm not SURE about rocker boi honestly, he's a decently made doll and I don't mind his body and I love his hair (soooo soft) but his potato head does bother me quite a bit. I feel like he really needed a little more well.. chin. 

I do like Punk Grrrl more than I thought though. I knew I loved her outfit just from photos but I also quite enjoy her hair, it's far prettier in real life than I thought (the greenish blue photographs much more blue than it actually is) 

I wouldn't call her look "punk" but then, what do I know? 

Now, Smyths have a minimum spend to get free shipping and also happened to have the one Ken that i've been eyeing for a while down to £10 (the fashionistas are about £13 over here) so I snagged him too.

Here's "Arcade" lol. Seriously his outfit is so 80s arcade carpet. It's horrible.

He's one of the newer fashionistas so comes in their new "fuck the environment, we're gonna pass the buck and responsibility onto the customers and CLAIM we're being eco friendly" bags. 

The whole shtick is "oh but it's REUSABLE, that means you, the customer, should reuse it and if you don't it's YOUR fault more plastic is going to landfill, not ours" but I raise the question, how many of these can you really use before you're drowning in plastic bags? 

Mattel, can we please just have CARD that's recyclable? That'd be way better than a billion plastic fucking bags to clog up our homes because you've guilted us into keeping them.

Anyway, the back of the box has a random assortment of available dolls which includes the wheelchair dolls for some reason. Kinda interesting to see such an assortment rather than the usual "just the kens".

The bag has a zipper that only runs along the top half of the bag for some reason, which is kinda awkward. It's also plastic tabbed just above the zipper pull so you have to snip that before you can unzip it and it was a pain in the arse to get a pair of scissors behind the plastic tab as it was so tightly against the zip itself. *sigh*

I hurt my finger on it. 

Thing is, once I unzipped it I realised how not actually very useful the bag was. Prior to opening it my partner and I had a discussion about what it could be used for. A pencilcase? to store doll accessories? paintbrushes? 

but because it opens only at the top it makes it quite difficult to get anything small out of it again, you'd have to tip the whole contents out which sort of defeats the point doesn't it? If it opened all along one side like a pencilcase I can think of things I would use it for (like you know, a pencilcase) but with the zip in such an odd and honestly awkward position it doesn't make a good pencilcase because the small bits sink to the bottom and then can't be reached without tipping the whole thing out.

Also once I opened it up I realised that once you remove the backing card the whole thing is REALLY floppy. It looks like it'd be quite a thick robust plastic but it isn't, it's very thin and floppy and really NEEDS the backing card inside it to keep its shape. So it would make a shit pencilcase or paintbrush holder even if the zip was along once side as it's too squishy and soft and would just squash around the brushes or pencils and wouldn't protect them at all. 

Hmmm.

inside there's just a plasic tray holding the doll. He had a few plastic ties holding him in but mostly was held in by the molded tray which is nice. Makes for a much easier to debox doll.

God that print is so garish, my eyes start crossing just looking at it. 

I feel like it'd be far less awful if it was JUST the shirt that was loud but the double pattern? not only does it look like pjs, it looks like BAD pjs. 

and the neon yellow shoes don't help.

poor guy.

He is a handsome boy though. He's a very dark brown (he's a shade or two lighter than the BMR curvy girl but a shade or two darker than MOST of Mattel's AA dolls) that's quite difficult to photograph well and huge relief, he doesn't seem to have the shitty uv printed dotty grainy gross face paint Mattel got obsessed with. His paint is fairly smooth and looks fine. Though I have to say I might not have painted his lips that colour myself... it's a bit pale for his complexion imo. They don't look too bad irl but in photos they really come up too bright and it bothers me.

He has rooted hair, or at least, partially rooted. The "shaved" sides are just painted but the middle section is rooted which is nice. This sort of hair definitely works better with fibre than it does when molded. Molded afro hair just looks wierd to me.

he's on I believe the current standard Ken body which is buff as all hell. Being a fashionista he only has jointed hips, shoulders and neck. I hope that I can find an articulated body to upgrade him to, that'd be awesome.

I dug through my clothing and found him a pair of shorts and some shoes that weren't hurting my eyeballs. I prefer this, he gets to keep the tacky arcade print shirt but it's less overbearing when paired with more subdued pieces.

The arcade print is SO 80s and when I put him on the mantle I noticed how much his shirt emulated the actual 80s clothing my Sindys are in lol. Sindy's outfit here is from 1987/88 and there's definite similarities in the patterns and clashing patterns hehehe.

It's nice to have a new Ken I like. It's been a while honestly. Most of the Kens Mattel has put out lately, much like the Barbies, have done nothing for me and it's been extremely disappointing. but it's saved my wallet hahah.

that's likely to change soon though because that new Barbie Looks line? OOOO nooooo, I really like a few of those and desire them BAD. *gulp*

Anyway, 

as well as indulging in clearance sales, I also managed to get out to some of the charity shops.

The BHF had this... er... interesting craft project. It's a Build a Bear Promise Pet cat but uh... well first of all someone's converted it into a bag.

See? Build a bear never made bags of their plushies. 

 

 

And the interior work is not very neat but the zip works, the lining though messy is perfectly functional and they did a pretty good job inserting the strap.

 

But that's not why I bought it. No, the reason I bought it is the face.

 

Everyone say hello to Spider Cat.

Middle kid declared it an abomination and wants nothing to do with it. The lady in the store was equally unimpressed. 

I HAD to buy this little freak okay!? 

It's okay Spider Cat, you're horrifying but I still love you.

Also in BHF were some small grab bags of Tokidoki unicorns which are always fun.

One of them is larger than the others and made of different plastic, which is wierd. I dunno, must be a different line. The other ones seem to be the blind bags. I have a couple of them already. 

The frog mermaid one is adorable hah.

Also my Doll Family H body finally arrived so my DIM twins got their bodies at last. WhOOP!

the DFH body is so much taller and chunkier than the Doll Leaves one. He's hefty as all hell. He also came with two sets of hands which I didn't expect.

So they finally now both have faceups. horah! 

Garret (the redhead) is a DIM Gayane while Ambrose is a DIM Annabeth. I always thought their sculpts looked really similar and painted up they're even more alike I think heh.

So that's two floating heads rebodied and waiting for their final outfits.

Only er... 4 to go?

Let me see, Wol needs a body, Ben needs a body, Larina needs a body and I also bought another head that's gonna need a body <_< DAMNIT

I need to stop buying heads.