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| Hi! I'm Princess Bendable! |
She has a really nice knock-off of the Barbie CEO face, but that alone wouldn't ordinarily have motivated me to do much. However, I took a look at her card information.
Modesto is where I live (this is not a secret). I'd never heard of Wondertreats, though a quick Googling reveals they sold gifts in some way. This is one of those clones that businesses buy on Alibaba or Taobao to be labeled with their own information.
Now, I knew this practice existed. Heck, dolls identical to the Dollar Tree Beauties show up with other labels. But this was the first time I'd had in my hand a definite example of the practice. And local too!
Had the checkout clerk not been scrutinizing me like I was about to shoplift a Christmas tree, I'd probably have taken a picture and left it at that. But for $2...
What sealed the deal was that I've been thinking about making a DIY Weird Barbie but any doll I like enough to do it with, I like too much to do it with. Here's a head I like that has no inherent value!
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| I think I had a little too much punch at the ball. |
Here she is, off her card. She doesn't stand well, due to have tiny Cinderella feet. Her dress doesn't fit (which is wild, since she's going to turn out to be on one of the standard Chinese clone bodies).
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| We're all feeling a little soft-focus today. |
Her face looks better in person, but she's so shiny that she repels efforts at photography.
Meanwhile, I did some digging on Wondertreats. Their address is in an industrial park, and it seems they sold gift baskets, largely filled with cheap Chinese imports. Their web site is down and their item listings on Walmart.com are gone, but there's a mild eBay secondary market in stuffed animals and toy cars labeled with their name.
I tried identifying the maker of the doll from their shipping records, since she doesn't show up in a superficial search of Alibaba. No luck -- they had hundreds of shipments a year, from numerous Chinese factories, and it's just too much paperwork.
Her elaborate hairdo ends oddly.
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| I followed a "hair hack" from Five Minute Crafts! |
So of course I had to undress her to see what was what.
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| Her tramp stamp. |
Her back has a stamp repeating the information on her card. Searching by the product number gets me nothing. Given that Wondertreats had been in business since the early 1990s, and our gal's attire suggests she wants to be both Cinderella and Elsa for Halloween (Cinderelsa?), she could be back stock from years ago.
So what's she like naked? She's awful.
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| The Prince was enchanted by my tiny legs. |
She has the most basic clone body, with the chopstick legs. This gal has got to be rebodied. Admittedly, I was looking for an excuse to order a body from AliExpress.
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| The fairy godmother used a full can of Aquanet. |
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| No, I wasn't scalped. I was born this way. |
Taking her hair down revealed that her rooting is just as bad as expected... and there's a ridge on her skull that's going to interfere with coating her head with glitter, as I did for Ambiguous Brown back in the day.
I tossed her in the Project Drawer without introducing her to the other dolls, as her quality is so poor that she was overpriced at $2. This is the kind of doll that was 15 cents wholesale, with free shipping.
Then I discovered that it is not necessary to reroot Barbie-sized dolls. You can buy wigs. Anyone in the BJD community could have told me this years ago, but I'm a primitive plastic playline person.
Not only can you buy wigs, you can buy Weird Barbie-ready wigs.
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| Monique Synthetic Mohair Brown Black Hot Pink Frankie Doll Wig |
I need to get cracking on this, as this one's almost sold out, and what Factory Direct Crafts has is close-out from Monique going out of business. Admittedly, at $10.49, it's worth 5x more than the doll -- but it's all kins of awesome. To get myself free shipping, I may buy Career Gal Emma a wig, too, as her clone hair isn't going to last forever. (Oh yikes! Free shipping is $50 minimum. Do I stock up on obsolete wigs?)
For a body, I have to look at AliExpress, as no real Barbie is going to match the pink sheen of Cinderelsa. And look what I found!
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| Doll Body For Barbie Accessories 11 14 20 Joints Can Change Head Foot Moveable Female 30cm 1/6 Girl Toys For Children |
Again, I've got to figure out who (present or future) might like a cheap articulated body to get the purchase over the minimum price for a 15-day shipping guarantee. But this is gold. Weird Pregnant Clone Barbie, with a close-out wig and the hot 2023 trend in bodies.
Shortly after originally posting this, I sat myself down to pick wigs and bodies. I ended up buying 5 doll wigs (since the maker is out-of-business, so I won't see them again) and four doll bodies. This is a substantial investment in a project that started with a $2 doll, but it's all in the vein of things I'd been vaguely intending to do anyway. It especially seemed like the moment to make sure I had some articulated Black bodies.
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