Style Bae by Just Play

 I always enjoy a bloody weird doll line and this one is pretty weird. 

take a paper doll, make it plastic, and inexplicably give it a 3d head despite everything else being 2d and flat.

profit?

well, let's have a look shall we?

So, Style Bae is a line of "paper doll" style toys which isn't exactly a new idea. Paper doll stick on fashions have come and gone over the decades, though this one stands out because the head is a regular looking doll head. 

which of course had most doll collectors scratching our heads in confusion. 

Why? What? Who thought that made any sort of sense? 

And at a fairly high price point (£19:99) were Justplay shooting themselves in the foot from the offset? 

Well, 

the line clearly didn't do well because only weeks after launch Amazon clearanced the two characters they'd gotten in to £10. £10 is low enough for my curiosity to get the better of me so I bought one.

at the time the only two available were Kenzie, the kinda punky brunette with pink streaks, and Dylan, the blonde blue eyed preppy girl. 

It looks like Smyths got the other blonde in, but the black doll is, as usual for the UK, completely MIA. -_- 

Is this the retailers fault? Or is it Justplay pulling an MGA and segregating the darkest skinned character to a case all of her own? 

I don't know.

I don't much care.

I only care that YET AGAIN the black doll is the one absent from our shelves. 

I'm tired of that shit. 

anyhoo

I got Kenzie, who was the one who's fashions most interested me anyway. 

So let's take a look at this bizarre mashup of a doll.

The box is very large and certainly feels pretty deluxe. But i'm honestly not convinced it NEEDED to be this big considering 90% of the contents is flat sticker sheets. 

The tagline for this doll ine is "fashions that stick" which feels... very lackluster. Could they not come up with something more interesting? 

The box also boasts 850 combinations which I think is bullshit. I'll have a look at the maths a little later.

The bit I, and a lot of people were most curious about though was the "reusable stickers". Now, i fully expected these to be those plastic slide decals that only stick to shiny surfaces. I had a set of dinosaur ones when I was a kid, you stuck the dinos on the laminated backdrop. I loved that thing, but the dinos weren't themselves sticky. They weren't "stickers". This claims stickers, so how does that work and how durable are they? Stickers aren't exactly something that screams "reusable". they are usually pretty single use.

The back of the box boasts 7 complete outfits. It also tells me that Kenzie's style is "pop punk star".

Whatever that means. Is she Avril Lavigne? That pictured outfit is kinda giving me vibes.

The side of the box has this lovely image of Kenzie which is so very different to her doll. Her head is small rather than huge and bulbous for a start. The pose is quite awkward and stiff feeling, but it's a decent piece. I just kinda wish they'd tried to emulate the proportions of the doll itself. I feel like doll art should LOOK like the doll you know? 

Curiously, the doll isn't actually boxed wearing one of her sticker outfits. it's just a piece of cardboard laid over the top of the plastic body.

This shows how oversized the box really is though. The doll takes up only half the box with the other half being a lot of empty space to hold a few things. 

All that's in the other side under the leaflet are some pieces for her "clothing rack", the sticker sheets themselves and a little mystery bag. They really could have made these boxes a good 1/3 smaller and still fit everything in there.

The doll herself has a completely flat body made of shiny plastic and a regular, albeit kinda bulbous doll head with very soft rooted hair.

She has glitter eyeshadow which I would usually hate but it's actually pretty decently applied and doesn't have that horribly gritty sand-like texture a lot of glitter on dolls have. It's thicker on one eye than the other but aside from hat her face looks to be pretty evenly applied. 

Another curious feature is that the eye shines in her eyes aren't white. The dots near her pupil are, but the oval shaped ones are pink?? that's very odd. 

The instructions aren't particularly detailed, but they do tell me there's a little scraper thing to help remove the stickers if I need it. That's a nice addition for people who don't have decent fingernails or weaker fingers. I mean I didn't end up using it, but it's nice to know they considered it.

Everything that's in the box. 

see what I mean about the box being crazy oversized? 

So she comes with a little bag of her sticker sheets which have a coat hanger hook at the top to hang then on the clothing rail.

the silver pieces are the clothing rail itself which is a bit flimsy but serves its purpose. 

then we have a pink stand base the doll's feet slot into. 

a pink brush

and the "mystery baaaaaag" 

The mystery bag contains the following:

A pair of headphones

two different hair barrette pairs.

some elastic bands

a pair of pink earrings

a pink necklace

a pink choker or... maybe it's a bracelet?

a silver watch

the scraper tool

a pink belt

and finally, a pink phone... thing.

I had to ram the barrettes into the brush to get them to sit in a position you could SEE their designs.

the pink ones are a giant safety pin while the silver ones just say "Bae".

The pink earrings also say "BAE" while the silver earrings the doll was wearing in the box are little heart shaped padlocks. Cute.

Her jewellery features a pink necklace thing with a heart shaped padlock, a choker or bracelet or something with a bead effect and a big B in the middle. A heart choker and a silver watch with some other bracelets attached. 

The necklace is flat and has hooks so it's not really useable for other dolls but the other pieces sure are.

The belts have this same problem, they're flat. So you can't really use them elsewhere. 

I admit it took me WAY too long to work out what the hell this was. It's a big chunky rectangle with a huge loop handle on the back. I was all "wtf is this?" til it finally clicked. It's a PHONE CASE! 

But it's so chunky and ill defined it just looks like a giant lozenge.

There are 7 Sticker sheets with a full outfit on each. Each features a top, skirt or trousers, a pair of shoes, a phone case decal and then two random extra stickers who's purpose I cannot work out.

The outfits delight me though. These are the sorts of things i'd wear as a teenager. I look at these and can go "omg! I had a top/skirt like that!" lol. 

This one is a long cargo skirt with strappy platforms and a yellow tee over a fishnet top. Very 2002 Camden Town.

This one is a really cute plaid skirt in three different colours with straps and a pocket with with a sleeveless blouse and tie, arm warmers, chunky boots and boot covers. Ahh boot covers. I had a pair of black fluffy ones which I wore over my Swear Amazons. Damn I miss my Swear Amazons. I wore those things to destruction. 

Swear still exists but their shoes are now like £200 and made to order so I can't just go into the store and try a pair on. I won't buy shoes I can't try on, I don't have the cashflow to take that sort of risk. But damn I miss those massive boots. *sigh*

This one is a bit less nostalgic. It's a racer style jacket over a crop top with a denim skirt and very high boots. Aside from the boots this one doesn't ping my "oh for my college years" memories.

The flame shirt lol. There was a period where flames were the big thing. 

the skirt looks to be vinyl or leather? 

I had a pair of boots like these, though they were ankle length. I also had stripey socks like these.

I would love these sneakers. 

Now what's kinda cool about this one is that the holes in the jeans are actually transparent pieces of the sticker, so the legs will actually show through the holes. That's very cool because most of the time you'd expect there to be a flesh tone under that, which would restrict it to only being able to be used with the doll who's skintone matches (a bit like a lot of Bratz shoes) but by making it transparent, ALL the 4 dolls can wear these pieces. Neat.

There's the outfit from the box! Only the shoes are different. For whatever reason. These ones have fluffy boot covers!

The final outfit for some reason has a textural fur element. It looks like all the dolls have ONE piece in their collection that has this and I don't fully understand why. I don't think it adds anything, I mean if anything it stands out and looks a bit messy to me. 

this one is a vinyl or leather jacket with inexplicably furry sleeves. The fur is glued onto the sticker sheet and is kinda rough. It's not particularly soft to touch, it sheds like crazy and the rough edges irritate me on a tactile level. DO NOT LIKE. 

the rest of the outfit is cute though. A little plaid skirt, mismatched socks and pink platform boots. 

I'm not sure if the fur can be removed. I picked at it but the glue held pretty solidly so I didn't want to push the issue.

The stickers themselves peel off their backing easily and then they just stick onto the doll as you'd expect. They're made of some sort of quite tough vinyl which means they aren't included to roll or fold on themselves but they also are very difficult to tear (I tried lol) They feel pretty robust actually. 

as for the stickiness, they're surprisingly sticky but not in the way stickers usually are. It's hard to explain but they aren't slide decals which aren't sticky at all, but they also aren't typical "stickers" in that they don't really stick to a lot of things that well.

for example, they don't stick very well to the doll's head but stick very nicely to her shiny plastic body.

They stick to paper but they don't stay on. If you peel the edge the whole sticker comes right on off without any residue. I don't think they'd stay on paper long term, a little jostling and they'd fall right off.

They also don't stick that well to skin. It sticks, but only in a very gentle way. As soon as I move my hand or touch the sticker it'll peel right off again. 

I'm very curious as to what the adhesive these use actually IS. It has the qualities of a slide decal in that it sticks best to shiny surfaces, but also has the quality of a sticker in that the back IS sticky and it kinda sticks to non shiny surfaces, just not very strongly. 

What also surprised me is that despite sticking these stickers on just about anything I could find, afterwards they were no less sticky. 

So I get the impression that the stick on these will last quite a while. Which was, ultimately, my biggest worry with the idea of "stickers" for a paper doll style figure.

Those transparent bits I mentioned earlier btw. This is super cool and i'm way more impressed by it than I think I should be lol. 

the stickers also stick well to one another, which is useful for overlapping things like the boots and pants. But like with the doll body and the sticker sheets, the pieces all unstick without much effort. You just peel from the edge and they come right off. 

I'm not convinced the 3d elements add anything here. The two belts are both really chunky and hook around the waist but I feel like a sticker belt would have looked better honestly. 

I mean, why not? The pieces all stick to one another and they're made of pretty tough material, so even a very thin piece shouldn't tear easily. 

That said, the real rooted hair mixed with the stickers is a PAIN IN THE ARSE. It sheds all over the place and gets very easily stuck to the stickers. 

also as an aside, the back of the flag plastic body is solidly red for some reason.

She also came with sunglasses, they fall off a lot. 

She has a painted bra and panties that say "bae" on the bands. I wonder if the other girls have a different style of underwear or if they're all just different colours. 

She also has a molded belly button which is a bit random given how little detail there is in anything else.

The clothes rack is very light and flimsy but the sticker sheets all attach well to it and it does at least give you something to put them on. It feels a bit high compared to the doll but i'm not entirely sure how high a clothing rail like this actually WOULD be. The ones in stores always seem to be shorter than a person so... I dunno.

Also regarding the sticker sheets, while there is a very faint outline engraved into each sheet showing where each piece is supposed to be, you can stick the pieces back on anywhere you like. The whole piece is made of the same shiny coated paper stuff.

I still don't understand the extra stickers though. WHAT ARE THESE FOR!?? 

I considered maybe they could be put on the tee shirts to change up the logos and teeechnically they can, but they're oversized and only two of the outfits Kenzie comes with even has a shirt that isn't layered under something else. The flame tee and the yellow "bae" lip shirt. 

Neither of these look good with these stickers on, not least because the stickers all have a fairly wide white border around the graphic. 

I feel like if that was their purpose they'd have been printed transparent like the rips in the jeans were. 

So what CAN they go on? 

they're too big to use as patches for any of the trousers or skirts either. 

and too large for the phone case.

so are they just to bulk out the piece count? 

what do I stick them on? The box? Myself? The doll's arse? 

Given the stickers don't stick that securely to paper I cannot see these being good for decorating your school books or anything. They'd stick fairly well to the fridge or my computer but why would I do that? 

Honestly I feel like this would have worked better if they were smaller and designed to be customisable patches for the outfits. Heck, if she came with a bag you could have made them small enough to decorate THAT. 

It's actually kinda odd she doesn't have a bag actually. Those are usually a doll staple. 

and it's not like she has pockets for her phone.

lol. 

Each of the 7 sheets comes with 2 random extra stickers, so that's 14 "i don't know what i'm meant to do with these" stickers. A waste of materials that could have been used to make an extra outfit. 

I also think it would have been really cool if the outfit pieces were more separated because the way they're designed you CAN overlap them. So why not embrace that and give us a top with a jacket that can be put over the top, a fishnet top you can put under any shirt, socks you can pair with any shoes? 

but this is, to be fair, the limited way most paper dolls are made. With premade complete pieces. Still... 

While i'm fairly impressed with how robust the stickers feel and the design of the outfits themselves, I still think a flat doll with a 3d head looks strange and her hair gets in they way of the gimmick in a manner that's quite frustrating. 

A flat plastic head and hair would have solved that problem. Heck, you could have given her a few different hairstyles that you could "clip" onto her scalp.

Anyway, my plan from the start was the rebody this head onto something 3d. 

so I did some digging and found that one of the Made to Move Barbie dolls was supposed to be a good match. I went ahead and ordered the Barbie at a discount from some clearance store. 

I had planned to try to use the packaging to make a flat head for the body but I think the box might have gotten thrown out so oops? 

Not sure what to do with the body in that case. I mean, I can see the mixing and matching of outfit pieces being quite fun to some people but without a head it's a bit macabre.

Anyway, as it turned out, the Barbie body didn't quite match Kenzie's tanned skintone but oh well. It's close enough. 

 Kenzie is a touch darker and more saturated a tan than the Barbie, but apparently the Barbie's vary wildly from batch to batch these days. Consistency isn't a Mattel priority clearly. 

The head was very easy to pop off, it's held on with a knob and you just need to heat it up a bit to make it a little easier to yank. Similarly, I didn't have to cut or mod anything to get the head onto the Barbie body, I just had to heat it good and squishy and be a bit forceful. 

She can look up but not down and she hasn't got much head tilt sadly, but she had zero tilt on the original flat body so even a teensy bit is an improvement. 

The body I used is the green top Yoga body:

But as I said, it's not a great match. 

I then dressed her using the green top from the original Barbie, a Sindy hoodie, a skirt from my stash which i've never ided, some rainbow high socks and some Karma's World sneakers. 

Barbie has tiny little hoof feet which means you can ram them into quite a few different sorts of shoes if you're willing to bulk the foot out with socks or something. I do this a lot because I freaking HATE Barbie's tiny hoof feet. They're so disproportionate, especially on bigger headed dolls which need larger feet to balance them out aesthetically. 

I managed to use Kenzie's original necklaces with some elastic bands. The choker fits fine but the necklace if you recall was quite flat and designed to hook around a flat body. It is however very soft plastic so with some elastic bands I managed to force it to shape around the new body and band it into place. 

Her bag was stolen from a Ken. 

I really like her now. Yes, the mismatch of skin tones bothers me a bit and I wish it was a closer match, but at the same time, a lot of dolls I have come out the damn factory with mismatched heads and body tones. 

I also like the proportions of the Barbie body with the bulbous Style Bae head. I considered smaller bodies like Ever After High because her head is a similar sort of size to those heads (and similarly round) but I didn't have any on hand and decided I preferred a more My Scene-like aesthetic anyway. 

Her head is definitely a lot bigger than My Scene of course. It's bigger than Monster High too. And very rounded. Ever After High is the closest similarity I can think of, but I think even then it's a bit larger. Bratz-like size maybe?

The hair is really soft and very thick but Kenzie at least, doesn't have a proper part line which made styling it a little awkward. Only the very front is parted, the rest isn't. 

Her face paint is done decently. It's simple, but it's crisp and clear and without smears or errors. The only issue is that the glitter is applied after and on top of the lashes, so that can cover them up completely. I ended up painting in the ones that were covered up.

As a paper doll her rooted hair gets in the way and the large 3d head and random 3d outfit elements feel out of place. However the sticker element is done well and i'm quite impressed with how tough the stickers are and how well they retain their stick. 

I can see child me having quite a lot of fun with those stickers. But I do think the hair getting in the way would have driven me nuts even back then.

I love the style of the outfits too. I wish they came in fabric versions because I would dress so many dolls in those sorts of clothes.

 I do think these things are massively overpriced at full price. The retail price on these is a hefty £19:99 which I think is excessive for a flat doll with no joints and some stickers. But at £10 it was a fun bit of time playing with all the combinations. 

I don't think i'll use the flat body again though. I'd rather make my own paper doll honestly. But YMMV on that. 

I do really enjoy my new hybrid doll though. She's got a sweet face and her hair is extremely pleasant to run my fingers through.