Doll Review: Beautiful Mom (Licca-chan)

We all have that one doll that we develop intense feelings for, right? It can’t be just me! For me, that doll is the current iteration of Licca-chan’s mom. She’s listed on the Takara Tomy Licca-chan website as LD-19 きれいなママ (Kirei-na Mama, lit. “Beautiful Mom”), with a basic retail price of 3,630 yen (but you can easily find her for a cheaper price on Amazon.co.jp). She was released in April 2015, but is still widely available in physical and online Japanese stores.

What can be so interesting about a family member-type budget doll with limited articulation (and some very weird one at that, as we will see later)? Well… many things.

For one, there’s the fact that Licca-chan’s mom is one of those dolls that you are somehow always able to find in physical stores in Japan. As I suggested before, Licca-chan’s mom and dad dolls come in “generations” that stick around and remain available in stores for several years, and the current generation has been around since April 2015! I am writing this in May 2024, so it’s been over nine years! Is a new iteration of Licca-chan’s mom doll going to happen soon? I frankly don’t care, because I am so inordinately fond of the current one!

Before I get into my in-depth review of the current iteration of Licca-chan’s mom doll from 2015, take a look at this YouTube video showing the different generations of Licca-chan’s mom doll since 1969. You can see that a new mom doll is released every 7 to 9 years, so the current generation is one of the longer-lived ones. Licca-chan’s mom dolls tend to have a mature fashion and makeup style that makes it easy to instantly tell her apart from most playline Licca-chan dolls. Depending on the generations, the style of the Licca-chan mom dolls varies: some are housewives, while some others are successful career women. For example, Licca-chan’s mom very first iteration, from 1969, was a fashion designer who had her own fashion boutique.

(By the way, did you know that Licca-chan’s mom full name is Orie Kayama? I will be calling her Orie from this point onwards!)

In the currently ongoing canon for Licca-chan, her mother Orie Kayama is 33 years old and she’s a fashion designer. She’s implied to be the one who makes most of Licca-chan’s clothes. Her Zodiac sign is Cancer, and her birthday is July 7th.

But let’s get to the actual review of the doll! This is her official stock photo.

Her box is very slim and made of durable cardboard. She can VERY easily be taken out of the box without ruining it, and you can keep the box and use it for storage.

The doll is exactly as tall as a Skipper doll, and can easily share clothes with Skipper and Barbie dolls (in fact, mine is wearing a custom outfit designed for Barbie dolls). She has beautiful auburn hair with textured waves that goes down to her waist. In the front, her hair is straight and short on either side of her face. She has a slightly open mouth with some very red lips and some noticeable red blush; this forms a striking contrast with Licca-chan’s typically lighter and pastel makeup looks.

Her hair feels a bit dry when right out of the box; plus, it tends to frizz out pretty soon after opening the box, which is something that tends to happen with a lot of Licca-chan dolls. HOWEVER! Just dilute some hair conditioner in some water and apply it on her hair using a towel (this is the method recommended by Takara Tomy to fix Licca-chan doll hair frizz, by the way), and, as soon as she dries up, her hair will have become mesmerizingly soft and frizz-free, and you will be able to appreciate its true quality.

The doll comes wearing a very simple-looking dress that actually has some construction to it, as it features sewn-on ribbons (a dark blue one around the chest and a light pink one around the waist) and sewn-on lace at the collar and at the lower hem. The top of the dress and the skirt are made of different fabrics (a fabric that feels like a dress shirt for the top, and a very smooth and glossy fabric for the skirt), and are sewn together on the inside.

Her shoes are made of flexible black plastic and feature painted details in the form of pink ribbons.

She has no accessories, but she comes wearing round silver studs as her earrings.

Her articulation is as follows:

• head: she can turn it and tilt it in a variety of different natural-looking poses;
• arms: they can rotate 360 degrees; however, her shoulder joint is disc-shaped, not ball-shaped, so her arms can’t go in and out. However, her arms are made of bendy plastic that allows you to pose them. In this regard, she’s more similar to a #Licca doll than to a playline Licca-chan doll.
• legs: … this is where things get a little weird. Orie has standard articulation at the hips. Her legs are made of harder plastic the feels less “bendy” than the legs of a Licca-chan doll. They can be bent a little near her feet, but it looks pretty unnatural, so… I recommend against using this specific feature!

To recap, here are Orie’s pros and cons!

Pros:

• Budget price
• Excellent quality, super soft textured hair
• Dress made with great quality fabrics
• Shoes with painted details
• Can wear #Licca, Barbie and Skipper clothes

Cons:

• The “bendiness” feature in her legs is pretty much unusable
• Hair needs conditioning treatment pretty much right after unboxing
• Perhaps not as visually striking as some previous generations of Licca-chan mom dolls

That is all! I just wanted to let you all know how awesome and incredible Orie’s current doll is to me, especially seeing how there’s a good chance that a new Orie may be on the horizon, since the current Orie has been out since 2015.