In this modding scene, big-eyed dolls are treated like gaming PCs

With eyes as round as grapes and lips too small to do anything but pout, Blythe dolls look like grumpy angels. Those ghostly looks work to their advantage in a busy market; Blythes has charmed a devoted group of mostly female fans over the past 23 years, many of whom pour thousands of dollars into customizing their toys.

Blythe, with toothpick legs and stormy eyes change color with the tug of a string at the back of her head, was once the strange girl at the lunch table. although skyrocketing Google searches for ‘blythe doll’ attest to her current popularity among fashion brands and collectors, American manufacturer Kenner originally discontinued her in 1973 after just one year on the market.

Still, some were left fascinated. In 2000, photographer Gina Garan released a romantic photo book, This is Blythe, in which Kenner’s serious doll is the perfect model, posing in oversized sweaters, then topless and looking demurely through a veil of eyelashes. Junko Wong, president of Japanese advertising agency CWC, saw these gauzy photos, blurred as if covered in vanilla lip balm, and “felt (Blythe’s) potential as a cultural icon,” she told the website Plastic and Plush. in 2005.

Wong relaunched her ‘neo-Blythe’ through CWC in 2001, and the doll has expertly implemented hypnosis ever since. “I heard about it through YouTube videos (about four years ago),” says 66-year-old Marna Kazmaier, who runs the informational website Whimsical Blythe, says Polygoon. “They were not appeals to me at first. But one day – I don’t know why – they were just really attractive. That’s when I went online to buy one.”

Kazmaier now owns tons of custom made and sold Blythes. Her collection includes a pair of original Kenner dolls (these have a retail value of approximately $1,000), dolls manufactured by the Ashton Drake and Takara companies (both valued at approximately $300), and a doll made by Good Smile Company, which is currently produces $160 dolls. for Blythe’s official online store, June Moon.

Kazmaier’s colorful collection represents the quintessential shopping experience for a Blythe enthusiast. Just like gaming PCs, Magic: the meeting cards, fancy headphones and other nerd products, Blythe dolls enjoy a niche but thriving online marketplace. A potential buyer can pick real Blythes straight from the Junie Moon vine – which is now produced in limited quantities, and only in Japan – or they can purchase one of several versions from a vintage reseller for around $200. But the world of custom Blythes lets fans’ imaginations go far beyond what can be found in Junie Moon’s humble online store. Careful scanning of eBay, Etsy and Instagram reveals available dolls with airbrushed, sensual faces, four sets of custom blinking eyes, articulated body parts and studio-level outfits.

Pre-built customs typically cost $300 to $800, although the dolls are just as often priced around $1,000 to $2,000 depending on the materials used and the number of hours put into their creation. The really high-end stuff – loose hair made from Angora goat’s wool, hand-sewn lace dresses, replicas of Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant – can sell for as much as $5,000.

This may sound like a huge fuss about dolls… and it is, even within the centuries old doll collecting community. Members of the relatively new Monstrously high POP fandom rarely modifies their dolls beyond a $200 paint job, and fans of one of the oldest collectible dolls, the Kewpie Cherub, which went into production in 1912, tend to stuff them into $5 hand-knit onesies at most. But collectors say Blythe dolls produce an irreplaceable maternal appeal for avid collectors. It’s all in their world-wide eyes.

“When I saw those big, buggy eyes, I couldn’t resist adding her to my collection,” says Natalie Preston, the 37-year-old New Yorker behind Etsy collectibles store WonderTreasures. “Her biggest attraction to me are her cunning eyes. The fact that she has four different eye positions makes her more lively and expressive than a static doll. She can have different personalities or moods just by pulling her cord.” These flickering eyes offer collectors a more robust and intimate customization experience than any other doll on the market; Blythe lets women shape their dreams down to the last detail, and she is more real than one designer baby.

Image: matte patches/polygon | Image source: eBay

But “some people will say that the only real Blythe dolls are the original Kenner creations from 1972,” reads a 2022 post. Toy Box Philosopher’s Post explain the difference between real and ‘fake’ Blythes. Other people buy relatively cheaper “factory” Blythes, or imitation dolls “marketed as being made from ‘real factory parts.'” Blythes made by the company ICY, as Toy Box Philosopher puts it, have “plumper cheeks and more almond-shaped eyes,” while the “DBS doll,” a knockoff made by the Chinese company Zhongshan Debisheng Toys, has different sizes.

These so-called knockoffs may or may not be a pest; it depends on the Blythe collector you talk to. Kazmaier tells me that she personally “doesn’t call any Blythe dolls ‘standard’ or ‘fakies.’

“Both words seem very wrong for dolls to me,” she says.

Junie Moon sells a lot of handicrafts eye chips ($5), dresses (up to $138), and airbrushed custom dolls (up to $900) also in the authentic storefront. But Trish, a 52-year-old web designer who sells custom Blythes through her website adorably mini, specifically looks for “cheap factory dolls” from China for use in more custom work. Hunting is part of luxury. “I spent $700 on dolls alone,” says Trish, and thousands on raw materials and art supplies.”

Abigail Rigby, who runs the custom Blythe shop The Quill and Clay, tells me her most expensive custom doll cost her “about $1,300” and a month of her time. For Rigby, working on a doll generally requires “sanding, cutting, sanding, sanding and more sanding” of the patient face until she gets to the “fun part,” the paint, for which she uses PanPastels, Sennelier oil pastels, colored pencils and acrylics, among other mixed media.

“Every Blythe customizer has their own way of doing things,” says Preston. She’s been modifying Blythes since 2012 (“I loved that you could easily remove her head,” says Preston), initially using them as catalog models for the doll clothes she sold on Etsy.

“I don’t normally start with a plan,” she continues. “It’s quite easy to ruin a doll’s face if your dremel slips, if you sand off too much, or if the plastic breaks because it’s brittle. I think a lot of customizers find themselves in these little ‘mistakes’, and that’s what gives each doll its unique personality.”

Photo: Natalie Preston

“The cutting process usually takes the longest,” says 31-year-old Nancy from Etsy shop BlytheDreamsCo. Nancy sells angelic Blythes that are fully customized, a process that involves swapping and individually placing eyelashes and making eye chips by hand, as she notes in one doll’s description. She wraps a Blythe by “painting the face and refining all the little details before a doll is finished.”

But it’s a satisfying grind, say the Blythe adaptors, and it pops the glittering boundaries of their imaginations like bubbles.

“I have this fun little fantasy belief that every (doll) finds her right mother (and vice versa),” says Trish. She remembers a doll she made last year called Gracie. The woman who bought it thought that coming across the doll could be a sign of the sun shining through the clouds. Her childhood friend Gracie died a few years earlier, she said, and Gracie the girl looked just like Gracie the doll.

“I still get chills when I think about it,” says Trish.

Moments like these – gentle moments that connect women of all ages, all because they fell for Blythe’s bizarrely wide eyes – make customizing Blythe a worthwhile hobby.

“People outside the community may look at (adapting Blythes) with some stigma and make comments about how ‘creepy’ it is,” says Preston, recalling how she was known as the “creepy doll girl” at her high school after she started collecting some in 1999. “But people in the community have a fundamental understanding of what makes us the same: a sense of wonder and excitement about all the possibilities of our creativity.”

Moreover, “the women and men I know who collect Blythe are generally of an age where we don’t really care what people think of us,” says 43-year-old Beth Ramsden, who posts doll customization tutorials. on Youtube. “I think Blythe, with her retro 70s style and oddly shaped head, seems to fit that non-conformist mentality!”

“Sometimes it’s creepy,” Preston thought. But “being creepy is also fun.”