Monthly roundup! - January 2016

Whooo eee January was a big spend month for me, so this is gonna be LONG.

It seems to be the combination of "omg I have money" from Christmas, the general "arghh" of christmas time making me depressed and in need of retail therapy and the fact that lots of new stuff hits stores and older stuff is clearanced around new year.

So... what DID I buy this month?

I'll be honest, I went overboard. I got a lot of cash for christmas for various family members who didn't want to think about actual gifts, and that's fine because it meant I could order myself a few things I was putting off because they were expensive ehehehe.

So, first things i ordered were of course the Monster High mermaids. I had managed to earn £20 in vouchers for Argos but because i'm cursed, a few days later argos dropped the price anyway. -_-
oh well.

You can see them in my previous review.

Hujoo Action - Arthur

I also ordered a doll from Hujoo on new years day.
He took several weeks to ship but when he finally did he zoomed from Korea to the UK in only 3 days! most impressive.

Now, Arthur is my first kinda BJD. He's not technically a BJD for two reasons. 1, snobbery dictates they need to be made of Resin not ABS plastic
2: He has geared joints, not ball joints.

But he is strung, he is big and he has all those features you'd expect from a BJD. Needs a wig,needs eyes, comes totally blank...

So let's rip this box open and see him!

Inside the box is a roll of soft packaging whatever... I don't know the technical name for this stuff, it's like a polystyrene blanket and i'm sure it has a term.

so here's the blank little face plate. The doll came fully assembled but nude and blank. For some reason I didn't take a photo of him all blank, I was too excited I think. I got straight to work trying to pry his face off lol.
Unlike all the other wigged/inset eye dolls i've ever handled this doll doesn't have a skull cap that comes off, instead his whole freaking FACE detatches from the body

Seriously it's freaking creepy.

The head is held together with these plastic prongs and it was an absolute B***H to remove. There's no give with the thick ABS plastic, so I had to find a long needle and pry the face off. It took a while of careful leverage and I did damage the edges of the face plate doing it but eh, a wig will cover that.

You can see in the above image the neck joint and all the elastic, it's held all in place with a plastic washer and a metal clip thing which I assume is there to stop the whole lot disappearing back down the neck.

The two prongs on the back of the head clip into the face plate here.

The face plate is really thick and really quite weighty. There's a third prong where the nose would be but i'm not totally sure where it slots in once the head is closed. There's also indents for the eyes.

Now, the info on Hujoo's website claims the Action Boys (to give them their proper name) take 20mm eyes.
This is a flat out lie.

20mm DO NOT FIT into those wells. 18mm eyes however, fit perfectly. Hmm.

He also takes a 7-8 sized wig.

Now, my Makies take 18mm eyes and size 7 wigs, so i tried both on him and wouldn't you know it, they both fit great.
Sweet.

It's worth mentioning at this point that the reason i chose Arthur out of all three Action Boys was because of his little tusks. I mean, how often do you see a doll with tusks? particularly a boy doll! I thought it was stinking adorable. He has big ol' elfy ears too, and i'm a sucker for pointy ears.

This is his official image from Hujoo's website. Pretty.

This is my own faceup.

I was honestly pretty intimidated by the idea of doing a faceup on a completely blank doll. Makies have guide lines with their moulded brows and such, but Hujoos? Nothing. Still, pencils helped a lot.

His ears are super pointy and actually kinda painful if you touch them. They're sharp man!

He also has this really long sharp nose which I kinda dig. His features are just so unusual, a long nose, big lips and tusks? You don't really see that in dolls, they're almost always conventionally "attractive" and Arthur most definitely is very unconventional.
I love it.

You can see how huge his neck seems for his head though. When you tilt his head it looks like it's on the wrong body, the fit just isn't quite right.

He stands 45cm/17 inches tall, putting him into the category of "MSD".
BJDs come in several sizes. Tinies who are 1:12 scale (like 5-6 inches/12-15cms tall), YOSD who are usually given younger looking bodies and are 1:6 scale (10-12 inches/25-30cms), MSD who are generally 1:4 scale (17inches/45cms approx) and SD who are enormous at 1:3 scale (24inches/60cms and up), usually super mature bodies with a lot of hyper realism.You can get even bigger ones too, but they look to be fairly rare.

Anyway, Arthur is an MSD and thus a lot taller than a regular fashion doll.

He's like twice the size of a barbie doll.

Yet slightly shorter than the giant Monster High dolls like Gooliope. And he's shorter than my Lorifina by quite a margin. She's massive.

He's also strangely a lot slimmer than Lorifina.He's a super skinny boy hehehe.

Anyway, let's get a decent look at this boy now we've put his size in perspective.

As I said, he's made of hard plastic, but he's still fairly weighty. The plastic is thick and a little shiny but feels good quality and sturdy.

He has really odd joints, but we'll get to that.

His head is slightly too small for his neck, which is wide and beautifully sculpted with visible collar bones. His upper arms are imo a little skinny and he has enormous hands.

The elbow joints are a double jointed system that theoretically allows him to bend them a decent 90 degrees but the gearing in them makes them stiff and awkward to move.

He has a cute sculpted tummy and oh my goodness a penis. A tiny ridiculous penis lol. Seriously, penises don't look like that!  did the sculptor never see one before? It's so out of proportion, it's like a baby dick on a grown man. Poor poor Arthur.
I always have found this a strange feature of BJDs, this bizarre NEED to sculpt genitals. like.. why? Why is it necessary? It just always felt a little needlessly perverse to me. And I know that makes me sound like a prude but I dunno, I don't really want to look at plastic willies on my dolls, they make me uneasy. Particularly baby penises like this.
His testicles haven't even descended! I feel like i'm looking at a child and it's creeping me out.

Ignoring the strangely smooth penis and undescended testies, his legs have several joints in them.
There's the hip joint which has a gear at the top allowing them to move in a very limited range of motions. I can't really splay his legs out, but they will move back and forward.
Then there's a rotational joint at the upper thigh that allows the whole leg to turn.
Then we have a double jointed knee and a really strange ankle joint that has a little plastic piece inside that mostly just pops out of position and locks the foot into weird positions.

He has a very defined back bone and NO BUTT. I repeat, this boy has NO ARSE. There's a crack, but no actual butt cheeks.
Ok this is because of the way his legs are made, any butt sculpting would interfere with his ability to sit or something but it looks weird. No butt and a baby penis, this boy has so many problems in his life hahaha.

You can see the back part of those double jointed knees. It's an ugly looking joint but it does the job. mostly.

There's also a joint at the middle of his body but I can't work it out. You bend him forward and the top pops out and locks onto these little plastic prongs, leaving a HUGE gap into his lower body. Wth?
Is that supposed to happen? It's hardly elegant but maybe won't be as noticeable if dressed? It just doesn't really look right.
The torso joint can't move side to side really, it just pops forward like this so i'm not sure what it's actually for. It doesn't seem to add much.

His knees as I said contain these ugly peanut mechanisms that mean he can bend his legs quite a bit, but they're very limited in their outward or inward motion. Because he can't actually splay his legs, he can't really cross his legs. This is as good as it gets.

This is as far as the leg will move in any direction (in this case both are pushed their maximum to his left) so you can see how that would be limiting.

A proper BJD shouldn't have this problem as instead of gears and such, they'd have proper ball sockets.

The peanut joint knees do however mean he can kneel fabulously.

For some reason he has little holes in his feet, like they moulded the feet hollow and then rammed a plastic lid on the bottom. It looks a bit odd having the soles of his feet lidded like this. Oh well, shoes cover all! hahaha.

He can just about stand supporting himself, though his ankles are a little weak and like to collapse.

His torso is abnormally long, made worse by his lack of butt which makes it look like the torso just mutates into legs with nothing in between. He's got a really strangely shaped body.

His hands are large but beautifully sculpted into a sort of dainty position. One has the index and pinkie finger extended while the other has all the fingers curved except the pinky. There's something faintly feminine about the poses of these hands, but they're quite pretty.

His elbow joints aren't great. Again the lack of rotational movement in the arms really limits his posing. He can still pose better than most fashion dolls sure, but i'd say his movement is actually a little worse than the frightfully tall Monster high dolls.
The gears which are supposed to hold the poses better make moving the doll really tough as they're stiff and grippy and make a nasty clicking noise as they move, and because they're a very simple gear they can't twist at all, limiting the motion.

I made him a new wig and touched up his face.

He has SUCH a pretty little face.

His huge eyes and soft jaw give him a somewhat androgynous quality, which I dig.

I feel like a lot of my problems with his body proportions should be remedied by him having clothing. It's a shame his range of motion is as limited as it is, but given his price point (£80/$110) he's CHEAP for a BJD.
He may not be a proper BJD, but he works well as a sort of gateway drug into the hobby.
He's my first doll at this scale, the first doll i've had to totally customize from scratch (he can't wear any off the rack clothing after all, so i have to either sew it or buy it from someone else who has) and i'm so in love with that face. I think he's so cute and so unusual, it makes me smile every time I look at him.

YES his body is limited and if you're used to bjds, his limited motion is going to piss you off. But if you're used to playline and have never handled a resin bjd and still wince at the price of them,the Hujoo action dolls are a nice starting point. The price is such that you don't feel so scared about touching and "ruining" them and it gives you a glimpse into the rather intimidating world of bjds. Practicing faceups, getting your head around sewing for an unusually sized doll, getting used to wigs and eyes and full customs etc etc.

I really love Arthur, despite his flaws. He's a cutie and his articulation isn't much worse than my Makies who aren't that much cheaper (actually his articulation is slightly better, he can cross his legs and touch his face! lol)

Now I just have to get him some clothes. <_<

I don't think I can stand to look at that penis much longer.

Hujoo Berry

Soon after new year the news came that Makie labs wasn't reopening as expected and was on indefinite hiatus while they moved to the USA. When or even IF they'll reopen remains a bit of a mystery, and hurting over the idea of not being able to finish up my space pirate crew, I bit the bullet and ordered a Hujoo Berry from Mimiwoo.
i chose the Hujoo Berry because the 1:6 Hujoos are fairly similar in proportions to Makies so I figured she'd fit in well.
I chose Mimiwoo because they happened to be the only dealer who had the bright tango orange dolls available. Also free shipping. Ahem.

Hujoo's 1:6 scale dolls have really strange alien faces, the girl ones have three faces to chose from.

There's the original Hujoo who I find frankly terrifying:

Yomi who's quite cute

and Berry:

 They also come in several skin colours. White, apricot, chocolate and then the fantasy tones of blue, orange and purple.

Purple looks to have been a really limited run, and orange was hard to find too but I already have several cool coloured dolls so I wanted something that would really stand out.

So I opted for an orange skinned Berry.

As it turned out, of all the dealers, only ONE happened to have orange ones in stock.

So I placed an order with Mimiwoo in Hong Kong and settled down for a looooong wait.

Finally after 2 weeks the doll dispatched and slowly plodded her way to the UK. She got stuck in Singapore for a week, which was annoying and  by the time she touched down in the UK I was convinced Customs was going to hold her ransom.

Well I needn't have worried. As it turned out, Customs hadn't touched my parcel and instead of going via Parcelforce as foreign parcels usually are, she'd been handed straight over to Royal Mail.

The postman knows me well. i was out when he delivered so he left them in my safe place for me bwhahaha.

I say them... I had another doll arrive the same time. I'll talk more about her in the next section.

So, with Berry I ordered some shoes for Arthur and 2 pairs of 20mm eyes. I was going to give Berry purple eyes, but I liked the cat eyes so much she got to have those instead.

I didn't get pictures because again, I was super excited to get started and forgot, but the 1:6 Hujoo head opens more like a normal skull cap. No face removal here, the cap section pries off and yes, just like Arthur it's a pain in the butt to do and left dents and scratches *sigh*
once you get it off the first time though it's a lot easier to remove the next time, so that's a plus I guess.

She takes 20mm eyes, which are held into her head with two silicone rubber paddles that slot onto little prongs inside her head.

You can see the prongs here in this official Hujoo image.

The eyes slip into the moulded wells and then these rubbery paddles slide over those big rods above the eyes and the teeny rods under the eyes to hold the eyes in place.
It's an ingenious solution. No need for eye putty if you're using traditional full round eyes with the added bonus that you can still move the eyes slightly with the paddles in place (allowing you to position them into a side glance or whatever before you put the head cap back on)

Hujoo dolls also fit 7-8 wigs but i'd say it's more like a size 8. The size 7 wig I had kept slipping off her shiny head.

As it was, i didn't plan for Berry to keep a wig for long anyway. With a little milliput and a lot of time I sculpted her a crest. part triceratops, part Klingon, I rather like how she came out.

Of course, originally I had wanted to sculpt her head piece so you could still open her head but the construction of her skull cap and the design I had in mind for the crest made that impossible. Oh well, I don't really NEED to access her eyes now.

The 1:6 Hujoos fit into Barbie stuff, but are actually closer to Moxie Girl size. They have quite slender upper torsos and a perky little pear shaped bum.

Unlike Arthur, there's no genitals here to surprise you.
Phew. i don't think I could cope with fluro orange vagina.

And she IS fluro orange. Much the colour of tango or more accurately, Fanta or Mirinda (not that shitty cloudy fanta the UK gets, I mean the bright orange stain everything it touches stuff)

She's VERY orange, she practically bloody glows with neon.

She has big feet, she looks to fit Ken shoes in fact. useful.

I glued yarn to the back of her crest so she had "hair". My attempts to make it as a sort of wig failed so yeah.

The hujoo faces are really flat in profile, with really large foreheads. I don't think they really look that human, there's an alien quality to all of them but it suited my purposes just fine.

As you can see, alongside teh Makies she fits in fairly well. Her eyes are bigger, but her head is a similar size and her body is very close (it's a bit skinnier)

She is of course shinier than the Makies and is differently articulated, but they work nice.

In terms of articulation? the 1:6 hujoos actually have a more standard ball joint system. No weird limiting gears, just ball/socket joints and elastic. Her joints have a tendency to pop out of place as you're moving her (particularly her shoulders) and she doesn't HOLD a pose too well due to the tension of the elastic wanting to pull her back into the default position but somehow who knows about stringing could probably easily fix this issue. As it stands, she can support her own weight and stand unsupported pretty well, but she can't keep her arms raised very nicely, they constantly try to snap back down. I think she's strung a bit too tight.

More Makies

Despite the Hujoo, I still was aching for Makies. I had the "itch" for another so I put out feelers.

Unfortunately with the shop closed, demand was pretty high and  those who did come up for sale were selling for out of my price bracket. Also, i'm not fast enough heh.

But luck smiled upon me eventually and a friend happened to have a girl he'd never quite bonded with.
She came to live here, with my army of Makies and has settled in well

she was missing a hand (an unfortunate mishap involving a sink I believe) and had been tea dyed by her original owner. Strangely, instead of turning brownish, she'd turned grey. Tea is weird.

Thankfully I happen to have a box of spare hands here, so she got a new one. Albeit not the right colour, but better than nothing right?

She also came with brown eyes, which i switched out for grey to match her grey skin.

Her original faceup had her looking a little unhappy, and I love faceupping Makies so I set to work scrubbing her clean and feeling a bit bad about doing so lol.
Why bad? Because I felt like I was saying my friend's attempt wasn't good enough or something. It was a cute faceup, it just didn't quite work for the plan I had for her.

Because makies are SUPER porous, not all the faceup would come off. This is why they dye so well, but also why the lighter colours can stain so easily.

Still, with her face gone I could appreciate what a cute sculpt my friend had designed for her.
pointy ears (my weakness!), pursed lips, a teeny button nose and big sad eyes. Ooo she was gonna be fun to breathe new life into.

I even blushed her new hand to get it to match her skin better.

I repurposed her original lashes (I quite liked how they were done, just this small whisp of lash) and gave her a black wig to further tie into her monochrome look.
Grey eyes, grey skin, grey lips and black hair. She looks yellowish in photos but trust me, she's grey.

I bought this dress ages ago, but none of my girls were girly enough to really wear it for long. Thankfully Misty was more than happy to wear it. And finally I have a doll who can wear the super cute Mary Janes!

She's so cute! Of course, 90% of that credit has to go to her original owner, because her sculpt is absolutely darling and her skin colouration, though not the intended colour is really really unique and interesting.

I'm not sure if she's a vampire, or a ghost, or just a goth girl who's never seen the sun. But she's beautiful and I love her.

Thank you SO MUCH Howll, you rock!

Delighted by Misty, I thought the itch was sated but then I happened to be on Ebay (dangerous I know!) when I spotted a familiar stark white doll.

Could it be? A classic Makie?
Yes, yes it was.
I ummed and ahhed for all of 5 minutes before pressing the "buy it now" button.

Interestingly I actually ended up chatting to the seller on facebook (he posted a picture of the doll on Makie's facebook feed and I commented) and so we got talking. Apparently he found the doll in a charity shop (omg I DREAM of this happening) and a friend recognized it as a Makie. Good thing they did too, because the old ones have no identifying marks at all and I doubt typing "weird white faced doll with inset eyes and hinged joints" would net much helpful.

Now anyone who reads my blog or talks to me ever knows i'm obsessed with makies, but for those who aren't "in the know" about what the heck a "classic makie" is, allow me to explain:

Back in May 2012 Makie labs launched their dolls in an Alpha batch of 100. Those first dolls each came with a certificate listing which number they were, were all stark white with no faceup and all came without shoes. They also all came on an usual hinge jointed body that was a little bit more fragile and not nearly as pretty as the joints of the later dolls.

This v1 body was discontinued in July 2013.

What is also interesting is that for a short while the boy dolls had different hands to the girl dolls. This was discontinued fairly quick but nobody who worked for the company can quite recall exactly when.

Anyway,

the original dolls had unusual faces, the girls were honestly a little masculine and the boys looked much older than the current "cutie" faces.

In November 2013 the "classic" faces were discontinued and replaced by Cuties.

I have two "classics" already, Vicky and John who were given faceups by the incredibly talented Sioux

They're on the v2 body though, and strawberry milk coloured, so this is my first time handling the v1 body or indeed seeing a classic "in the flesh" without customization already.

From what we can establish based on my internet stalking, this doll was probably made some time around July 2012. Whether he's Alpha wave 1 or wave 2 or pre alpha promotional I cannot say, nor do I know how he ended up in a charity shop. but he's home now and he ain't going anywhere!

So here he is!

I don't know his name, I don't know much about him at all but he's adorable.

He comes wearing one of the first Makie outfits, called "the Hoxton" it's a pair of lightweight denim jeans with seam detailing and an elasticated waist band, a slightly too short blue and white check shirt and a soft black jacket that feels like it's made of some sort of light suiting or felt.
He also has a powder blue ribbon which would have held him into his original tube.

His wig is a short fur wig, glued so hard to his head it's not coming off... ever. It's shorter and coarser than the modern fur wig.

He has standard green Makie eyes, a broad face, cheeky smile and slightly pointy ears.

I don't think he's ever had shoes. Makies didn't come with shoes for a fair while, poor barefooted dollies.

This is a boy hand, the fingers are broader and more rounded than the super pointy female hands. Fairly soon the lab realised they didn't really need unique boy hands, so just gave all dolls the pointy fingered hands.

Back in 2012 a doll like this with no faceup and no shoes would have set you back £99, ouch. However the outfits were a lot more detailed than the modern ones are. All of the outfits were made of proper fabric, not that strange stretchy lycra stuff and the outfits were all layered. It wasn't just a shirt and leggings, you could get proper suits and all sorts. It was awesome and I miss them, the old outfits were super cute.

Though the jeans had a tendency to stain and you can see this on this boy when you remove his pants. He has some light blue marks on his groin and upper legs. Oh well.

I ummed and ahhed over whether to give him a faceup. On one hand it felt like sacrilege when he was one of the originals but on the other hand, he didn't look right without his face done. He looked unfinished.
So I plucked up the courage and gave him a very light faceup

Colouring in his eyebrows also helped hide the blue stain on his brow.

I happened to have a lot of glasses in my stockpile, he suits them.

Faceups on white dolls is a nightmare, I have to say that. Any mistake shows up glaringly and is super difficult to then remove without leaving smudges.

It doesn't help that the way this doll was printed means there's a tiny flaw that runs across his forehead and two spots next to each eye that are much much thinner so light shines through, making him look like he has slightly blue stains by each eye (he doesn't, it's an optical illusion caused by the super thin nylon at those points).
I'm not sure why the nylon is so thin just near the eyes, i've never seen that before. Possibly he's from one of the first batch and they were still calibrating the machine to get it right. 

I also gave him some shoes at long last. Poor boy has been barefoot for years!

He looks much happier now, one could even say smug or smarmy.

The girls weren't overly impressed by this pale interloper i'm sure they'll get used to him in time.

Monster High stuff:

I also bought another frightmare off Ebay. Tesco apparently had them for £1:50 but by the time I got to my nearest Tesco they'd been cleared out. Boo.
Oh well

This is Fretz Quartzmane who appears to be some sort of centaur/gargoyle hybrid.
I admit, I don't really understand how the frightmares tie into the Monster High franchise. Are they hybrids? Are they something else? What the heck is their deal?

But they're cute and small.

Problem is, here in the UK they're retailing at £12 which is WAY too much for such a little figure, they should really be more like £8 at most and it's clear i'm not alone feeling that as they shelf sit until they go on special offer and then disappear off shelves (well, except the pink one who seems universally hated)

Fretz was my favourite of the first wave. She's all punky looking and grey and red, I like that.

There were four originally. A green aquatic themed one, a purple skeleton? themed one (uh.. what?) and a pink... I don't even know, she has pegasus wings and then freaking horns. it's baffling.
And Fretz here, a gargoyle themed one. They're all centaurs mixed with something else, goodness knows why.

Anyway, they're kinda MH meets MLP.

The figures are TINY, they're about 5 inches tall and have static posed arms.

Here's my two alongside Avea Trotter. The Frightmares have chunkier limbs but of course none of the articulation of Avea.
They also strangely have human-like ears not horse ears. random.

Both my Frightmares have wings, they're not removable.
Fretz's are one moulded piece glued into her back.

They also both have these strange fin tails. I believe the other two have more horse-like moulded tails.

Fretz's cutie mark (what? that's totally what it is!) is a series of scratches? and like the MH gargoyles, she has embedded dots in her grey plastic to mimick stone. Around her tail she has a rose decoration. It doesn't stay on without the elastic bands.

My other frightmare Bay Tidechaser has a big fin crest on her head, fin wings and seaweed/bubbles for her "cutie mark"

I did some OOAK repaint work on her though, her face was all wonked so I fixed it and got a little carried away blushing her lol.

As you can see both dolls have these front leg cuffs. They don't stay on that well without the elastic and while they have a lot of moulded detail, it's all lost because there's no dry brushing. They NEED drybrushing. 

Fretz has little horns sticking out from her long red and black streaked hair. The hair fibre is quite nice, it's very soft and silky and doesn't actually go staticky like a lot of the MH dolls.

She has angry eyebrows, big blue eyes with dots underneath and bright red lips. Her face is actually really cute. I think all the frightmares have the same head, just painted differently but it's a cute little head.

The human torso is fairly cheap looking with a moulded top, rigid rubbery arms and a removable belt/skirt thing.

This image shows the absolute maximum her arms can move (just straight up) and her legs (the front ones only go this far and her back legs only bend this far, so she can't lie down or anything)
Still you can get some fun poses if you're willing to balance her against something

She'll only stand unaided if  all 4 of her legs are in EXACTLY the right position.

The bent arm is ridiculous lol.

Under the belt/skirt thing there's a torso joint which allows her to bend forward

Like this.

Which is quite nice. Certainly more movement than I expected from the little thing.

Her whole torso can swivel the whole way around (full 360, which is horrific hahah)
the "non display" side of the doll looks much the same as the other side, except no cutie mark.

She has nicely sculpted hooves I think, with little tufts of fur.

her head tilts as well, it's on some sort of ball joint so has a surprising range of motion.

So all in all? I'm actually pretty impressed by the Frightmares. I expected them to be totally static piece of crap but they have sweet faces, a nicely sculpted horse body and a surprising range of motion. yeah it's limited, but what can you expect from something so teeny? the fact there IS motion is more than I anticipated.
I wish they didn't have moulded clothing but at the same time, it does make them very very easy to play with. They're a good size for small child hands, they're robust enough to tolerate play (the waist joint is likely a weak point but you'd have to be pretty rough) and I think kids could really enjoy them. They don't really fit with the MH dolls though, they're too static, too small, but as their own line? I like them.
I think i'd have really loved them as a kid.

I still think £12 is way too much though. I got Bay for £6 and Fretz for a similar price second hand, that's much more the price they should be. They remind me of Zelfs of My Little Pony in terms of the target market and price point, they should be that sort of price not the same price as an actual DOLL ffs.

There's a second wave of these now, and I kinda want more hehe.

Finally, clearance.

B&M had haunted dolls for £7:99, Spectra and Clawdeen jumped into my cart and I regret NOTHING because they're beautiful.

The EU version of Haunted Spectra is gorgeous with narrow sultry eyes and wide pouty lips. I think the US version looks strange, I don't like her.

Clawdeen well, i'm a sucker for any Clawdeen who differs from the normal "brown hair" look. I love every Clawdeen with unusual hair and this one is also a unique skin tone. She's a pale shimmery brown colour that's really really hard to photograph. I kinda feel like she needs darker clothing to really make her hair and skin tone "pop"

New Argos catalogue launched mid Jan, and that meant some older lines were removed from the website. This wasn't so much of a problem except their exclusive Freak Du Chic line, which was overnight bam.. gone. I'd been umming and ahhing over whether I wanted those two dolls and if I could justify it. Well, Argos went and forced my hand didn't they?

What's frustrating about Argos and their catalogue is how random it seems to be with what carries forward into the next book and what's removed after only one season. Boo York for instance mostly carried over, except Astranova who's gone. Freak Du Chic carried over, albeit at a clearance price except the exclusive two.. wtf?

So to get ex catalogue products I had to go into an argos and ask a member of staff, who helpfully had an old copy of the previous catalogue. We looked up the code and that meant I could check their stock. Just because they aren't in the catalogue doesn't mean they aren't sitting in the warehouse out back. yeah.. random right?
one store had Twyla only, and at clearance price of £12:99. Sweet.
Second store I went to had both in stock but wanted £19:99. Booo. still, I got Clawdeen anyway because I wasn't sure i'd ever get another chance.

Knowing my luck, they'll now appear in B&M for £7:99 right?

Again a Clawdeen with unusual skin tone, this time she's actually almost grey. I'm not sure WHY they keep giving Clawdeen different skin colours, i'm not sure I approve of the unintentional implication of only the black character getting her skin tone constantly messed with but at the same time, I like Clawdeen because she's always the most different in every release. Almost all Draculaura's and Frankies etc look the same, but each Clawdeen is almost like a totally new werewolf. I like to pretend they're all different Wolf siblings and cousins heh. To me, the strangely coloured Clawdeens are NOT Clawdeen, but that doesn't mean I don't think they're beautiful as their own character.

Twyla's hair looks like it's going to be a frizzy mess, but i've seen other people able to tame it so i'm sure i'll manage.

The of course with the Mattel news of this Monster High reboot (eugh), I decided the time had come to start collecting up those lines i'd either passed on at the time thinking "oh I can't justify it" or "they'll release another version similar for cheaper/when I have money" or the stuff that flat out wasn't sold in the UK.

Top of my list was Sweet Screams Abbey, a doll who for some unknown reason never made it to our shores. The other three did, but never Abbey. Wth? Seriously, Ghoulia shipped here in her OWN DAMN CASE, how does that make any sense?
Stores kept advertising Abbey, but I don't believe anyone ever found a single one in a UK store.
Thankfully Amazon.com's 3rd party sellers had her, and a couple were willing to post overseas.
All in, with postage and VAT she cost me only £16, not bad for a doll that's currently selling on Ebay for about £30-40. If you want her, try Amazon.com (who aren't jerks like amazon.co.uk. They have always come through for me and NOT screwed me over repeatedly. Yay amazon.com. BOOO Amazon.co.uk. Screw those guys)

But anyway,

Abbey!

She's fabulously mental! With the super dilated eyes, the black streaks in her hair, those bizarre waffle gloves lol. Sweet Screams is such a demented line, it makes me smile. Something about it really makes me think of Tim Burton, it's all like, swirls and twisted shapes. It's gloriously ott.
I bought the first two, Frankie and Draculaura a long time ago and never opened them because of the problems finding Abbey, but also because their boxes are awesome. I probably will now though.

I haven't opened any of these new MH dolls yet because i'm  a lazy bum, but also because I can't quite face the torture that is deboxing a modern MH doll. I'll do it later, when i'm feeling the need for new dollies. Might help stop me spending more cash heh. I doubt it, but one can hope right?

I also bought 2 Bratz Boyz off ebay but failed to take photos before I put them in the "boyz box" (one day i'll have space to display them) and a couple of Zelfs which are totally my "impulse, I want something cute" thing to purchase.  I like Zelfs, I haven't bought a lot from each line but there's always a couple I really like and at £5:99 they're a great little impulse buy.

Of course now I feel a bit overindulgent. I still have a list of Monster High and Bratz Boyz I want but we're getting into the rarer, harder to find stuff now so it may be a while before I can afford to finish those collections.

Meanwhile, i'm lusting after more Hujoos (they're cute ok?) and Makies. I dream of one last white one, to finally dye green. My last two attempts at a green Makie failed and while I love them anyway, damnit dye companies, kelly green is NOT teal nor is it almost black ffs. Get your shit together.