By Richard Cerda, Vice President, JC Toys
Realistic baby dolls cover two quite different things. Most of them are made for children to play with. A smaller number are made to be kept, displayed and photographed. Those are a different purchase entirely.
This is about the second group. What makes a doll collectible, what you are actually paying for and how to look after one.
If you are buying for a child, how to choose a realistic baby doll is the more useful place to start.
It begins with the sculpt
Everything else sits on top of the sculpt. A doll is a face and a body that somebody carved. The paint, the hair and the clothing can only work with the shape underneath. A generic sculpt cannot be rescued by good finishing.
This is where the collector end separates from the rest of the category. Many makers work from a small number of faces and build different sets around them, so the same expression turns up across a range under different names. Every JC Toys doll comes from a hand designed original sculpt and we have developed hundreds of them over more than thirty years.
That is also why the reborn category exists at all. Artists took JC Toys original sculpts and reworked them by hand into lifelike newborns, because the sculpts were good enough to build on. There is more on that in what a reborn doll is.
What you are paying for
Collector prices reflect hours rather than materials. A few things account for most of the difference.
Hand painting. Realistic skin is not one flat color. A well finished doll carries subtle variation built up in thin layers, with blushing at the knuckles and knees and painted detail on the fingernails and lips. On our Berenguer Classics that work takes several days per doll.
Weighting. A weighted body settles when you hold it the way a real infant does. It is the detail people notice first when they pick one up and it is also why these dolls are not built for small children to carry.
Rooted hair. Applied strand by strand rather than molded. Slow, skilled and it does not grow back if it is damaged.
Limited runs. Collector dolls are made in small numbers, which is part of what holds their value and part of why a particular sculpt can become hard to find.
Our collector range
The Berenguer Classics are made in Spain in our own doll factory in Castalla, using baby soft vinyl and Genesis paints, with face sculpts drawn from Salvador Berenguer's fifty year career. Each one is painted by hand over several days and weighted to feel like a real baby.
The 17 inch is graded 14 and up as a collectable. That number is the clearest signal of what a doll is for. A doll graded 14 and up was made to be kept. A doll graded 2 and up was built and safety tested to be played with, which is what our Bonbebé weighted reborn is, despite looking every bit the collector piece.
The wider realistic and reborn collection holds both ends of that range.
Looking after a collectible doll
The realism lives in paint on the surface, so ordinary cleaning takes the artwork off.
- A soft damp cloth only, never on painted areas, no solvents or cleaning wipes
- Never submerge a weighted doll. The filling does not dry out
- Brush rooted hair gently from the ends upward. Do not wash it
- Keep it out of direct sunlight and away from heat, both of which fade paint and age vinyl
- Support the head and body when lifting
The full detail, including what to do about sticky vinyl and pink discoloration on older dolls, is in how to clean and care for your baby doll.
Displaying and photographing
Most collectors display rather than store, which is its own set of problems. Direct sunlight is the main one and it is gradual enough that people do not notice until the damage is done. A shaded shelf away from a radiator or a sunny window will keep a doll looking right for decades.
Photography is a large part of this hobby now and it is where the sculpt earns its keep. Soft indirect light shows the paint work. Hard overhead light flattens the face and makes any doll look like plastic.
Where we fit
We are a family business and we have been designing and making dolls for more than thirty years, across three continents. We design and manufacture our own, which means the sculpt, the materials and the testing are ours to answer for rather than someone else's to explain.
The sculpts are the reason the dolls look the way they do. Collectors worked that out before anyone else did.