Dolls from My Current Collection

I’d hardly thought about dolls much at all after I turned about 10 or 11 years old, but during the holiday season of 2022, I became curious about if I still had any of the ones from my childhood, and I found a handful of them.

I had kept my Rio de Janeiro Lea because of my own personal nostalgia, but most of the others had been donated to daycares and thrift shops because at the time, when I was approaching my teens, I had assumed that I would simply stay having “grown out” of dolls as I had for the previous two or three years. I didn’t expect to take any interest in dolls again at any point in my life, but around the holiday season around two years ago, I became curious about what must’ve changed between the dolls I grew up with and the ones that are made now.

I didn’t really know that there were YouTubers who specifically make videos just about dolls until that year, and upon watching a few of them, I took some time to try to get to the core of what prompted me to search for them in the first place. I still don’t have an answer I can articulate all that well, which puzzled me. I like looking at the faces of dolls and watching people customize, repaint, and talk about them, and the versatility that can come out of many face molds. Although I couldn’t come up with a more complex answer than that I found one or two of them nostalgic and others just aesthetically pleasing, I very, very slowly slid back into collecting them, though I do not have any great amount of them.

My Rio de Janeiro Lea is on a BMR Barbie. Before being placed in a box in the attic once I had hit my double digits, she was the protagonist and heroic adventurer of all of my imagined childhood games and held up surprisingly well after a myriad of “Barbie Death Battles” and scenarios that my cousins and I were convinced could rival A Series of Unfortunate Events with the violence dialed up to eleven. I decided to rebody her to display her on my shelf and photograph her. My Looks Model is here because I was thrilled to see a Barbie doll that looked similar to myself in some ways, with her very short dark hair, serious expression, and petite frame. She has a Fashion Fever dress on. My BMR Kira is here because I had never gotten a Kira for myself and was curious as to what she would look like in person. I was surprised at how round her face is, but it sets her apart well from the other dolls, and she is a very unique addition to my collection. The Barbie Basics Lea, the Flying Hero Kira, and the Chinese Barbie were all given to me as gifts. The Barbie Basics Lea is the only Model Muse type of doll that I have, the Flying Hero Kira seems like something I would’ve enjoyed if I had been born just a few years earlier, and made for a great almost-nostalgic gift, and the Chinese Barbie is just one of my personal favorites from the Dolls of the World line.

I picked up the 80s Rewind Midge to give to my youngest cousin as a gift, but her tastes have changed, and she is now completely focused on Hello Kitty toys and paraphernalia. My Made to Move Teresa, on the other hand, is here because I just like her face mold, and decided to make her the third doll in my current Barbie collection that year. I intended for purple to be her main color to offset the primary blue of my Looks Model and Lea.