Rainbow High - Emi Vanda

Okay yes, I know, it's been months. The end of the year is chaotic for me and this year it was just a mess. I had no motivation to do doll stuff. 

But i'm back now, i'm actually alive and all that. 

And i've FINALLY gotten a hold of Rainbow High Emi Vanda. 

Why has it taken me so long? Well 1: I'm cheap so I didn't want to buy all of the wave 3 ones I wanted at once (because it's ouch expensive) and 2: She kept going out of stock. 

Let's get into this.

 

Box is the same as all the other rainbow high boxes. I still hate trying to open these but at least i've gotten better at it. So much plastic shit. So many plastic tabs. Eugh. 

I wish companies would stop with the bullshit plastic staples in doll's hair.

Emi had two big ol staples in the back of her head which were stressful to remove because the backing plastic is so heavily glued to the backing card I couldn't get it off. And then it's split into two fake pigtails held in with four plastic loops. 

this just messes her hair up when you get her out of the box.

Also, SHE STINKS!

The gel or whatever they're using has a strange smell, it's not pleasant and far stronger than I remember any other rainbow high doll being. Ew. What the hell MGA? Poor stinky doll is gonna need a good wash. 

She's gorgeous though. Emi is "orchid" coloured (is orchid even a colour? I thought it was a flower) and her name references this. Vanda Orchids are purple or fushia, which happen to be the colours in her hair.

She uses the same face mold as the twins I believe, with the narrower almond shaped eyes. I really like this sculpt, more I think than the original one.

This is her hair straight out of the box. It looks wet in this picture but it's not, it's just absolutely caked in slightly greasy gel (stinky gel!) and all messy because of the stupid packaging. 

It's very long like all the rainbow high dolls (I really wish MGA would give us some damn variation in hair lengths), slightly wavy and completely unstyled. Again this is an ongoing thing with the rainbow high dolls where the vast majority of them, to me at least, feel unfinished. Like all the effort went into the outfits and hair colours, then when it came to the final touches (IE: styling the hair) they just couldn't be bothered/ran out of budget. 

It means that most of the rainbow high dolls have hair that's slightly wavy, ankle length and center parted. I find it really boring and uncreative honestly. I mean yes sure, a lot of people just wear their hair like this, but this is a fashion doll line! If they're wearing all these detailed designer outfits, you'd think they'd ALSO watch some damn hair styling tutorials on youtube or whatever.

Emi is extremely pretty. Her hair is, as I mentioned, a blend of purple and a deep fushia tone. Her eyes also include these colours, with a little splash of blue as well. Mine has a tiny scratch on one eye but thankfully you can't see it unless you really look. 

Emi has silver glitter around her eyes along with this blended blue and purple eyeshadow. Her lips are pale purplish pink with a darker lip line and painted teeth. 

 Her nails are painted the same colour as her lips. 

Despite having pierced ears, like most of the wave 3 dolls (are they wave 3? i've lost bloody track) she doesn't come with earrings. Again, I find this adds a degree of "unfinished" to the doll. It's not like they didn't have unpierced doll ears previously. And it's also not like you can just buy earrings separately as MGA aren't doing fashion packs. So... what the hell? 

I find it wierd. Maybe it's an attempt at cross compatibility but I do find it quite strange that SOME dolls have earrings and others don't. Even across the same wave. It feels inconsistant and confusing. I see earring holes, I think "did her earrings fall off? Are they in the box somewhere? am I missing parts?"

Her first outfit is cute enough but i'm not a fan of the hoodie. It's black with embroidered detail, including an embroidered handbag which I find honestly pretty tacky. It's like those tuxedo t-shirts, it's just lame. 

And I know, it's riffing on a real designer piece, but the designer piece is tacky imo too. What is the point of a fake bag? It's dumb.

the embroidery is very nicely done though, very detailed and unusual to see on dolls. But I can't help but wish the hoodie didn't have the stupid bag on it. It makes me think of children's clothing, not something a grown woman or teen would wear. (where does she keep anything then? Would she wear a real handbag with her fake embroidered one? It's not like her skirt has pockets)

The hoodie has cut outs on the sleeves with faux zips which is an interesting punkish addition that feels at odds with the cutesy embroidery but whatever. 

The skirt is really nice. It's made from a rather thin fabric that drapes nicely and has teensy little pleats. I love the colour of it too. I've always been quite fond of this dark fushia shade, definitely the best of the "pinks". 

She wears nothing underneath the hoodie and i've seen a lot of people complain about staining from the dark fabric. So I was wary when I undressed her that I may be dealing with some very blotchy arms. 

Thankfully it seems either I got lucky, or the later releases of this doll have had their black clothing actually colourfasted. She doesn't have any staining at all. PHEW. 

The rainbow high body is wierd to me. The feet bother me a lot. They always look like they're the wrong way around when they aren't. Is that just me? Something about their shape feels off, making her look like she has two left feet. All my rainbow high dolls have this and it bugs the shit out of me. 

Her joints are very stiff with the exception of one hand which is a bit loose. Hmm. 

I wish they'd fix the elbow joints too. The knees have a proper double jointed piece but the elbows don't, they get stuck and barely bend 90 degrees. This irritates me because while yes, I know, MGA fucking SUCK at articulation, the amount of over engineering that went into this body you'd THINK they could have sorted out elbows that could actually bend enough to touch the doll's giant balloon head!

Emi's boots are massive. They are, I think, the same mold as those rainbow boots that came with Avery's closet set. They're over knee boots with "RH" logos all over them (does the school just produce its own couture clothing or something?) and a strange addition of threaded bows at the top. These hold the soft rubbery plastic closed better at the top of the leg but they feel a little bit random. 

They're pretty easy to get on and off which I appreciate though. 

Her second outfit has more pieces. A short sleeved cropped pink hoodie, a cropped long sleeve tee with "rainbow high" written all over it and a short black skirt with ribbon decorative suspender... things. 

Her shoes are again, quite odd. I love the socks which have little crescent moons on them, but the shoes themselves bewilder me. 

Like the doll's feet, they look wrong when you put them on, they look "off" to my eye even when they're on the correct feet. They always feel like they're on the wrong feet. Something about the way they bend inward is just pinging "wrong" to my eye, just like the feet themselves. 

They're pink with a black sole and gold "r" and "h" heel which at least helps work out which is left and which is right (I wish they had a l and r on the sole or something though). They have a ribbon lace which has pros and cons. The pro is that unlike plastic laces, these won't break as soon as you put them on the doll. The con is that if they come unlaced from the teensy tiny little slit they go into (which is easy enough to do) relacing them is absolutely nightmarish. 

The ribbons have "rainbow high" written on them in teensy tiny lettering but only on one side. 

The full outfit didn't quite work for me. I feel like the shoes are a bit too "ballerina", too girly for the very gothy short skirt. They'd be adorable on another doll i'm sure, but they didn't work for me with Emi who gave me more gothy punky vibes. 

Also that right shoe was pissing me off with how wrong it looks. 

And so, having deboxed the doll, now it's time to fix that stinky hair issue.

Having boil washed it (the water turned an unsettling cloudy grey) how choppy it was at the bottom became extremely obvious. 

Interestingly, this hair fibre is VERY reluctant to straighten with simple boiling water methods. Most dolls you dunk em in boiling water and the fibre goes pretty straight but her hair would straighten up and then dry with a curl in it again. Wierd. 

The choppy ends also look damaged, a little split and kinda frazzled. 

Rainbow High dolls often have very choppily cut hair, which adds to that "unfinished" vibe I talked about earlier. I feel like they root the hair and then just don't want to do any finishing touches because rooting such a large head was such a chore in the first place. 

a lot of my RH dolls have very unevenly cut hair that looks like they rooted it in and then didn't bother to cut it at all, leaving it all different lengths. They also tend to have a lot of loose hair that results in a lot of shedding straight out of the box. It feels like they finish rooting, slap some gel in and call it a day. 

In Emi's case, she also has hair that's rooted a bit oddly (actually a LOT of the dolls have this issue). The front is thicker at the temples than anywhere else, which means it has to be swept back to sit correctly. It kept falling into her face and getting tangled in her lashes, it was annoying me.

now, as someone who collects vintage dolls and has had to restore by eye original hairstyles, this screams "this hair isn't supposed to be styled like this" to me. If you were rooting a doll for a center part you wouldn't put extra hair at the front like that, you'd have it rooted so it framed the face, not so it bunched up around the front. But MGA do what MGA does, making sense clearly wasn't a priority *sigh* I think they were going for a bit of a "front curl" but on such a big flat head i'm not convinced it quite worked out.

To me, her hair didn't quite feel "complete" or finished. In person it just didn't quite sit how i'd have wanted it to. Looks fine in photos but that's only because in photos I could tuck up back for the few seconds it took to snap a shot.

I felt like barettes or mini pigtails might work better as that's what the style of rooting screamed to me.

This is what I mean by mini pigtails. I didn't have another clear hair band, I need to buy some more.

Can you see how thick the front pieces are? center parted hair wouldn't usually be rooted with those thick chunks at the front like that, that's just not how you root doll hair for the style she was presented with in box. This may be a wierd side effect of the giant flat heads, or it could just be MGA being lazy, but it doesn't look RIGHT to me. Emi particularly looked like dolls I find secondhand who've lost their original hair style and have their hair bulging out oddly as a result.

Karma has this same issue, where the front chunks of her hair are too thick and need to be swept back out of her face. She also has strange little pieces at the front that fall forward. Again, I wonder if both dolls were supposed to have clips like Georgia's. That would make a lot of sense and explain why the front of the hair doesn't actually sit correctly. 

Or maybe I just don't "get" modern doll hair or MGA was going for that cute front wave that only ever looks good for a photograph and immediately gets into your eyes as soon as you move and is a pain in the arse in real life too.

I dunno. Just from my experience over the past god knows how many years, Emi's hair is rooted in a way that doesn't FEEL correct and was annoying me.

I much prefer her hair like this, it sweeps it back out of her face and stops it constantly flopping into her eyelashes and getting caught. It also means she has slightly more interesting hair. 

I also cut it a LOT shorter. 

I did this for two reasons.

1: I fucking HATE ankle length hair on dolls. It makes them top heavy, it gets in the way when you're trying to dress them, pose them, do anything with them and it's completely unrealistic. 

and 2: her hair was SO choppy that a lot of the pieces were knee length with random pieces that were ankle length and no rhyme or reason to any of it. Also a lot of the longer pieces were very damaged looking at the ends with frazzled bits. I cut all the damaged bits off and cut the whole lot to one even length. I also ran my hair straighteners through it to get it a bit smoother and neater. 

It refused to actually straighten though. It would go lovely a pin straight but then as soon as you moved her it'd start to get a curl again. Wierd. 

Her hair is still a little damp in this photo hence why it's kinda flat.

I grabbed Daphne down to get a comparison. Do they have the same face or are Daphne's eyes bigger? I don't even know anymore. I think their eyes are different. Emi's seem smaller. They have very similar skin tones, Daphne is a touch darker but it's subtle.

Daphne has the same wierd chunky rooting at the front. Seems to just be how MGA are rooting the dolls and i'm not sure about it. Daphne's seems to sit a little more neatly than Emi's though so doesn't jump out as so glaringly "wrong" to me. Go figure. It looks more natural. Maybe it's because she hasn't got streaks, or it's not quite so thick as Emi's which definitely tends to slip forward into her face lot more than Daphne's does. Daphne's sits back from her face, Emi's was rooted to fall forward over one eye.

You can see how choppy Daphne's hair is too, but I didn't cut hers because the semi crimp she's got going on hides a lot of it and the ends aren't as obviously fried. (I really wish she had the crimp her promo version had, MGA really didn't put much effort into emulating that did they?)

Why did Daphne get earrings but Emi didn't? Budget?

I do love that we now have a variety of face molds, it definitely helps make each doll look more distinctive. I wasn't convinced i'd keep buying Rainbow High after wave 1 because the same face issue and dully styled hair didn't inspire me much. But then MGA was all "new face molds!" and they dragged me right back in there lol.

Georgia's barrettes keep her chunkily rooted hair from flopping into her face and it really makes me feel like the rest could have benefitted from the same. Also her curls hide any uneven bits.

In Emi's case I suspect the cost of that embroidered hoodie is why she doesn't have earrings or hair accessories but honestly, I would have preferred a plainer hoodie (more versatile) and some hair clips or something. Some little crescent moon shaped barrettes would have been cute and called back to her socks from her alternate outfit. 

Or you know, elastic bands and some earrings. 

The empty earring holes bother me okay?

I do think she's beautiful though. I like her a lot better with her hair cut shorter and evened up though. (it's not totally even still but she has so much hair that cutting it was really awkward) That uneven straggly cut was going to drive me crazy and I like that I can actually see her pretty face with her hair pulled back out of her eyes. 

Photos really don't do justice to how BAD the frazzled ends were. Nor do they really do justice to how pretty she really is. I definitely think she's substantially nicer in real life than any of my photo attempts, which is a bit annoying.

She's still got a wierd smell though. It's not as unpleasant, chemically or strong, but whatever gel they use for these dolls doesn't smell very pleasant even when you rinse the hell out of the doll.

Overall, I do like Rainbow High. I'm not big into fashion so I don't really GET a lot of the fashion references or some of the designs, a great many are simply not to my taste, but I enjoy the colourful hair and I like the variety of clothing pieces. 

I also do quite like the shape of the body and the heft of it. I just wish the elbows weren't so crap. The dolls are very difficult to pose, especially once dressed and I find it irritating. 

The newer ones do at least now have neck articulation so can tilt their heads, something the first wave couldn't do, but revision of these elbows would be a huge improvement. 

I hate these damn elbows. 

I would also like to see more variety in hair styles and lengths. Right now the vast majority of the dolls have near identical haircuts. Overlong, unstyled, center parted soft waves with straggly uneven ends.

In wave 3 we have two with a side part and ankle length waves. 3 with a center part and ankle length waves and 1 with a high half ponytail. 

That's really not very varied at all. 

wave 2 was much the same. Only ONE had any sort of proper styling to her hair, the pink one who had pigtails. (why is it always the pink one?)

I'd love to see more dolls with fringes/bangs, more with updos or shorter hair. Heck, it'd be awesome to see a few with actual SHORT hair as it's not like that's gone out of fashion. I'd like to see more variety, more representation of modern fashionable haircuts to go with the clothing. It feels a bit jarring to me to have dolls that are wearing clothing that's very inspired by big fashion houses but not taking similar inspiration for hair.

And it's wierd because MGA's other line, LOL OMG do have a lot of variation in their hair styles and lengths. So it's not like MGA don't have people on staff who know how to have fun with hair. 

I feel like as too often happens, toy companies get hung up on this idea that "little girls like extra long hair on dolls" and forget that an awful lot of little girls these days don't even have long hair themselves. 

On top of that, Rainbow High are increasingly making it clear they aren't really designed for younger kids anyway. The shoe designs on Emi are especially not kid friendly, those ribbons are kinda fiddly and there's no way a kid will be able to easily rethread those if they come undone. I don't even think i'd be able to do it without a lot of swearing and using a needle or something.

And the clothing referencing big fashion houses is something I can't see many 8 year olds being aware of or indeed caring about. 

I'm honestly not totally sure WHO the target audience is for Rainbow High and I think that's also a problem MGA themselves have. Their hair design screams "this is for children" while the fashions feel far more "this is for collectors who'll appreciate/understand the references"

And I think it's telling that if you look on Instagram you'll find countless collectors who've spent the time and effort restyling the doll's hair because much like me, they feel the hair lets the whole look down.

of course, this is just my own personal observations and opinions. YMMV. 

But i'd love to see MGA push the boat out and really start doing more interesting things with the line's hairstyles. They've put all this effort into varied makeup styles and all these fashion looks, can we please have some fun hairdos to go with it all? 

Because I mean, unlike a lot of doll collectors, I SUCK at hair play and don't really enjoy it. I like dressing dolls, which is why two mix and match outfits is right up my alley, but I kinda resent having to cut a doll's hair because it's uneven and damaged or having to restyle it because the company couldn't justify a couple of sodding elastic bands in the budget. -_- 

 I still don't like the boxes, I still think the stands SUCK and the brushes are useless. But wave 3 has had far fewer sewing errors than wave 2 and been overall substantially less disappointing. 

though I will mention that Georgia's secondary outfit tends to lose pearls because they're just glued on and fall off with very little pressure. So be warned there.

But that's me done with wave 3 now. At least until the others go on massive sale. 

But MGA being MGA, they're already releasing about a dozen MORE waves. It's a bit exhausting actually. Not to mention expensive. 

Give us a moment to take a breath MGA! Please! 

And recover financially.