Mama's got a new pair of knees

 Simply Fresh Kylie can now touch her face, practice yoga to deal with her stressful entrepreneurial career, and wear standard Barbie clothes.

The catalysts for re-bodying her, in defiance of my original intention of keeping her as her maker intended, were two. First, when I took her out of the enclosed storage where my dolls spend most of their time, I discovered that her hair has become lighter and redder. Oxidation is not what I'd expect in a doll that was unboxed less than six months ago and has been kept out of sunlight, but here we are.

Second, Target had its "25% off any toy" offer for Circle members expiring this weekend, and it also had one single African-American MTM doll on the $16.99 card. While $12.75 to rebody a discount-store doll isn't the bargain of all time, it's also not bad, and it beats waiting for an AA MTM doll to show up at thrift. (My local thrift stores are so, so bad compared to the bounty I enjoyed in Arizona a decade ago. Plus AA dolls with any remotely desirable feature are less likely to show up at thrift anyway.)

Time to boil some water! Getting MTM's head off was easy, despite the head spike. Maybe beheading Barbie's is like riding a bicycle: once you get the knack, you never truly lose it. Kylie was another thing entirely. The one thing this low-end doll committed to fully was that her head will not come off in energetic play. She needed four dunks in boiling water and so, so much squeezing to get her head off.

Once off, heads went on their new bodies with much greater ease.

It feels weird, but somehow... good.

Kylie's head is larger than MTM's head, but big doll heads have become so normative that I don't see it as any wilder than the Hasbro Disney Princess proportions were. MTM's smaller head makes her look like she got Amazonian proportions through some serious work at the gym.

I'm much happier with Kylie having motion, and this ups my enthusiasm for the 2024 rebodying of Manbun Ken.