Usually I don't buy brand-new dolls. I prefer to buy used ones because they're cheaper and because I don't care about the original body anyway (Mattel bodies suck).

But this time it was our wedding anniversary, so we decided to buy a new doll for each of us. My wife got Juan Gabriel, and I got Dolls of the World China.

The doll was nicely packaged, and nothing seemed wrong so far (and yes, she comes with a bear!):

I swapped her body for a MengF White one. Unfortunately, her original dress is not detachable:

Which is very disappointing. It's the first time I've seen something like this. Maybe in the future my wife will help me fix it by sewing a button onto the back.

But the main problem isn't her dress. It's not very noticeable in photos, but the hair is weird (sorry, I didn't make any photos upclose). It's fairly normal for doll hair to be greasy straight out of the box, since manufacturers use gel to keep it in place, but this time it was something else. It felt especially strange to the touch, almost sticky.

I decided to wash her hair with shampoo, which usually removes this kind of grease. But not this time! I washed it four times - no result.

I googled the problem, and it turns out that glue seepage is extremely common in Mattel dolls from that era (2010-2016). Mattel used too much glue to hold the hair in place inside the head, and over time this glue can seep into the hair 😢 To detect a doll with this problem, you can try pressing the top of the head - it will feel unusually hard. And this was exactly my case.

We found online that it's possible to clean the hair using harsh cleaners, but that would only be a temporary solution - the glue is still inside the head and will continue to seep into the hair. The only permanent solution is to remove the glue from the head entirely and reroot the doll, i.e. replace the hair.

Even though my wife is good at rerooting (you can see an example of her work here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/63464998), this doll's hair has really nice curls that would be lost after a reroot. So we decided to clean the hair and see how long it takes for the glue to come back.

Unfortunately, we didn't take photos of the process, but here's what we did:

1. Washed the hair three times with Cif.
2. Let it dry.
3. Covered it in talcum powder for about 16 hours, making sure the powder was well worked into the hair.
4. Washed it two more times with Cif.
5. Let it dry.

And it worked! The hair looks and feels great, at least for now:

A few photos of her in her new outfit:

I'm happy with the result, but I'd recommend avoiding dolls from that era 😅 I wish I'd known about this earlier, so maybe this post will be useful. Not sure how many doll enthusiasts there are on Lemmy, though. If you have a doll, do a post, we need more content like this 🙂

I'll write another post once the glue comes back. Maybe I'll include photos of the cleaning process next time.