When exploring 18" dolls, it's sometimes hard to get a sense of what you are really getting until you have it in your hands which is why we continually do doll reviews. Sophia's is a relatively new doll, and if you have frequently purchased 18" doll clothes on Amazon inexpensively, you may recognize the brand. What intrigued me about this doll first off is that she is listed on Amazon for $43.25 (at the time I bought her) and that she is a wigged doll. Having looked at many 18" dolls available at Target and Walmart in the under $50 range, all are rooted hair dolls. Not that is bad, but wigged dolls are more useful to me as a business as I love to customize and show off new wigs on my doll models. So this doll intrigued me as well as the description that she was a soft body doll. There were not any unclothed pictures of the doll for me to really see how she was constructed, but I ordered one out of curiousity. Regular Amazon purchases come in about two days, but it was a full week for this doll to come in. My guess was that it wasn't fulfilled by Amazon directly and so it had a much longer lead time. When she came in, she was in a pink very generic looking box with a front window and large letters stating 5+ as the appropriate age range. Interesting because American Girl shoots for 8+. I noticed right away that her hair accessory had come off her head in transit so her first presentation to me was a bit wonky, but then again we are talking about a $40 doll. Ok so first impressions. Packaging is what you would expect from purchasing a doll in a Target, Walmart, Walgreens, or other inexpensive toy aisle. It's cute with flowers and stripes and pink so it's very girly. Three twist ties on the back of the inner packaging gets the girl out of the box without need of any tools, so it's a quick unwrap. She came with a gold sequin dress and gold shoes and little floral undies. The shoes had little roses and velcroed at the ankle, foam bottoms. It's your basic very inexpensive shoe. The dress is very cheap with very thin inner lining although it is lined so props for that. Outer sequin is ok. It's a dress fit for a cheap doll. What surprised me was the doll's hair. It is wigged, and is actually soft with a blended mix of colors and a sewn hair part. It is very light, but the coverage on the head is good. It of course doesn't have the weight and feel of higher end wigs like what we carry, but it's better than 90% of the doll hair I've seen on off-brand (non-American Girl type dolls) and definitely not cheap nasty hair. She has blinking eyes that are a turquoise color and a thin curved line for eyebrows. Her nose is rather stubby and shallow but cute and she has a light blush on her cheeks with full cheeks. Her mouth is partially open with two front teeth that have a space in between each tooth. Stock lip color is a light pink and there are actually groove marks on the lips to account for lip detail. Ears and neck are very much similar to an American Girl as well as how she is constructed, with the same soft body torso and then vinyl head, limbs, and legs. Something I could tell right off the bat, is that although similar in body construction, the arms and legs are relatively straight in shape and appear to be much thinner than an American Girl doll. I want to say it's more like looking at a Journey Doll with not very much definition between the thigh down to the knee and to the calf and similar up and down on the arm. The hands and feet come french manicured which I think is a nice touch. The panties this doll comes with are actually more adorable to me than the dress. They are made from real cotton jersey like human undies with lacy elastic. You can see from this picture how straight up and down those thighs are. I want to say that the torso cloth is just slightly darker than her skin tone and is closer in color to bodies seen on Josefina, Kanani, or Nanea even though she is clearly a lighter skin tone. The back of her cloth had a little tab that was glued over her neck area to cover up a zip tie. I removed it, partially to see what was under there and because I didn't want it there. The feet on this doll are longer and skinnier much like a Gotz doll, but I found that 18" generic shoes and our shoes fit her just fine, so it doesn't seem to matter that she has slimmer feet. Doll Measurements for Sophia's 18" Doll: Height: 17.75" Waist: 10.5" Chest: 11.5" Hip: 12" Arm Length: 7" Sleeve Length to wrist: 5.5" Bicep: 3.75" Forearm: 3.5" Wrist: 3" Leg Length: 8: Thigh: 5" Calf: 5" Ankle: 4" Foot: 2.5"x 1.25" at toes and 1" at heel Neck: 6" Head: 11.5" Overall her measurements are very similar. She feels lighter than an AG doll so I had to weigh her and she came in at 1.5lbs which is actually the same as AG so there isn't any difference there. Other than the arms and legs being slightly slimmer and a slightly slimmer foot, this doll matches all the measurements in the heads and torso for an AG doll. It will be interesting to see how she looks with upgraded customizations. I definitely want to experiment with her.

I like to explore different brands of dolls, especially ones in the 18-19" little girl series just to see what is out there and it seems like reviews on sites these days don't really give the information we all need as collectors, so here is my review. Tonner Penny and Friends pleasantly surprised me. I bought a little blonde beauty in a ballet costume, to try out as Tonner being a former clothing designer, I felt the ballet costume would be top notch. The dolls don't appear to be named although in some eBay listings I've seen a doll name attached. Penny refers to JCPenny as apparently this doll line was featured in JCPenny in 2000 for a very short time. There didn't seem to be a lot of models blonde with blue eyes, blonde with green eyes, blonde and brown eyes, red hair with green eyes, and a darker skin model with brown eyes. Most of the models feature a red leatherette jumper dress and the red hair girl with glasses which kind of reminded me of Molly from American Girl. I'm not sure if the ballet girl was a special holiday doll, but I haven't seen other dolls in other outfits. I'd list it in the category of slim 18" dolls even though she is technically 19" tall from head to toe. All vinyl from head to toe (no cloth body at all) makes all fashions look good without having to worry about joints and seams. The body is not jointed so you really have the motion range of up and down and out for arms, sitting or standing for legs and head rotation and tilt for the head. I haven't looked inside, but it's likely that this doll is strung to give her movement which means repairable if she gets broken or a little one tugs too hard. Neck is very slender, so it's likely that eye changes are going to be through the front of the face with a hair dryer rather than a boiling method. Stationary eyes. The stock eyes are a pinwheel design in blue on my doll with center black pupil. They don't give off super stare eyes, but they are just kind of basic, so I'd really like to see what she looks like with a more realistic eye. Her face shape is adorable. She has a pronounced chin rather poutycupid bow lips and her line from her chin to cheek is more v shaped rather than chubby or round like a younger child. Her skin tone is very pale and more pink in tone than an American Girl fair skin tone which has a lot of yellow and brown in it. She has an almond shaped eye that is a little larger than proportionate to her facial features. Her stock makeup has a pink blush on the cheeks, almost a coral pink on the lips, and drawn eye lashes at the corners of her eyes. She has very thinly drawn eyebrows in blonde that are very light I almost didn't notice them. Around her eyes there are indentations for a lid and under the eye like a real person, I notice they skip that detail on many dolls. I don't know what it is about her legs but they are shaped really adorable. She has a little bit of chubbiness in the thigh that indents down to the knee and then curved down for the calf to the feet. Her feet are slimmer and longer but American Girl shoes would swim on her. I'll have to try maybe another slim 18" shoe on her, maybe Carpatina? Measurements: Feet: 2.75" x 1.25" wide Leg Length: 9" Calf: 4.75" Thigh: 5.75" Arm Length to fingertip: 7.25" Sleeve Length: 6" Bicep: 3.5" Wrist: 3" Hip: 11" Waist: 10" Chest: 11.25" Neck: 5" Head Size: 10.5" (Wig Size 10-11") Eye Size: TBD Eye Type: Stationary My overall opinion is that this is a very quality made doll. She is strung, which means she is repairable if a child tugs too hard, and an all vinyl body means she's easy to clean when dirty. Her ballet costume is very beautiful, Tonner did great work on it, it's just what I would want if looking for a ballerina doll. It has beaded and sequin detail, fluffy pink tulle and ornate lace. She had a matching pink tulle hair accessory and a brush that came with her. She has full tights and the costume was lined. My only complaint is the shoes. They are pretty made of a pink velveteen and decorated with beaded and sequin lace flowers, but mostly it's paper on the bottom sole. The person who previously had this doll didn't damage the shoes, but I could see in the hands of a child those shoes getting crushed or wet and then they would be a gonner. I have a love hate relationship with bows on ballet shoes. Mostly they are done with ribbon, but it is almost impossible to lace them up the leg and have them stay there. These are the same, once I criss crossed to the end and tied the bow, it just sunk to her ankle in a pile. She's a wigged doll. Her hair was rather dry, almost reminded me of a 90's Kirsten with dry hair, but wig replacement was easy and fast to a newer wig, so very easy to restore.

Last night we watched the Netflix Documentary "Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy" which was an inside look at corporations getting it's consumers to buy more and more in order to make larger and larger profits without a thought to what the after effects were. After I watched it, my stomach churned which I'm sure was the goal of the film and I found myself questioning whether any of these terrible practices were something that our little business contributed to. Below I address the rules they sited in the film and reflections on how our business deals with that. Rule #1 Buy More Rule One explored how corporations made intentional decisions to shorten the life of their products such as making a light bulb only last 1/3 of it's potential life in order to get consumers to replace light bulbs more often and therefore buy more lightbulbs. Other examples showed technology saving version upgrades so that you'd want to buy a new phone or new computer before the other one wore out to get the latest technology. I found that we as a company actually do the opposite here. We build our doll clothes, shoes, and wigs to be long lasting with the goal in mind to be able to pass down dolls from generation to generation. If you've shopped around for doll supplies in our industry, there are a lot of cheap products out there. $1.99 shoes and $29.95 dolls and it seems the price keeps driving down. It's not to provide you with a better deal folks it's to get you to buy more. In my mind I always thought it was because some corporations decided to produce quality products and others decided to produce cheap products, but the darker thought here is that they are selling this crap to churn more sales as you are continually replacing products. Rule #2 Waste More When you are producing more to get more people to purchase and replace, there becomes more waste. The example in this case was Amazon where the shopping experience was key in that any thought in your head that you needed something, you could simply go to your computer and purchase anything that you wanted and then it would arrive at your door without ever leaving the house. They showed examples of consumers with boxes upon boxes at their doorstep. Yes you can purchase a can opener one day and then a pair of socks the next and they would come in separate boxes. Packaging waste, peanut waste, plastic waste. The terrible truth of where this waste "goes away" when you put it in the garbage is that it goes to areas where people are already struggling in lesser economies than ours. There were pictures of clothes floating in the oceans and piles on the ground, and people crying out that there was more coming in that could even be handled by the people that lived there. And the most appalling of all, to produce products that are intentionally not fixable so that you have to buy a new one instead of fixing the one you have. We are small, but we really try our best to re-use everything possible as we are conscious of waste in the world. We re-use packaging, boxes, ribbons, fabric, clothing, and of course dolls to try to give new life and minimize what ends up in the garbage. Our doll hospital transforms old dolls into ones that can be loved by a new child or collector. We run a doll donation center to re-home dolls to be loved once again. Most of our signature art dolls are made from dolls that were ordinary or mass produced and then made special. Our goals of "Save a Doll" are to keep dolls from the trash, even if they aren't trendy or the next "it" thing. Most importantly, we are actively making services available to fix toys rather than encouraging them to be replaced. I was quite angry when I saw in the film that they were gluing laptops together so they couldn't be opened and shorting battery life on headphones to make you buy a whole new set when they gave out. It's incredibly wasteful and with the purpose of making a consumer purchase another one. Reminded me of Robots movie when they made the decision to not make spare parts any longer to push the older robots to spend their money on an upgraded body. I see that decision when I'm trying desperately to find parts to fix dolls. It's another reason why people move on from one type of doll to another is that you simply can't find the parts to fix the doll or no one is selling clothing or shoes or whatever you need to keep your doll collection going. We as a company, hate this concept and do everything we can to bring back parts and clothes to make it possible to keep your older dolls in better shape and in good repair. If that wasn't all, there were examples shown of corporations destroying merchandise that didn't sell or that had been returned because they had calculated that it was cheaper to burn it than to go through the system again and sell again. That definitely does not happen in our company. We do not burn unwanted merchandise and we don't add it or donate it to landfills. Perhaps I have been lucky, but I always find a way to repurpose something that wasn't successful and thankfully it is not many instances. Rule #3 Lie More Incredibly disheartening that larger corporations make you feel like they are addressing any of the problems when actually they are just running feel good campaigns to make you think that they are. I always believe that you should be upfront about what you are capable of doing and what you are not. As a small business, we have smaller goals. Oftentimes there is more that I want to do but am not capable of at the moment. For example, sometimes I get a doll that gets donated and I just can't find any solutions to fix her and I think, what I need is "this part" or something that is unavailable. It is not possible for me to start manufacturing missing needs for all the dolls, there are many and I don't have the financial capacity to do so, but I would never promise that I can fix every doll under the sun, or that I have parts for every doll under the sun. But I will give every doll the opportunity to find a new owner and be adopted and loved again. I'm happy when I can add options to our website that meet a need, and that has always been our goal. We don't just produce a bunch of stuff for kicks. In fact many times a customer will come to us and say, how about you add this to your website and I tell them 5 other sellers already have that, I don't need to add it just because everyone else has it. I want to add things that make a difference for collectors. Rule #4 Hide More I really didn't like seeing this one where they show you things that are supposed to be recycled or donated to a thrift store or donation center and it's ending up being dismantled into tiny pieces in a third world country that is drowning in garbage. I did even see a clip of dolls and reference to making products better for the environment. I really enjoy seeing people that upcycle with their art because I think it is an important thing in most industries. Making something new and interesting around something that has been discarded is one of my favorites for most things. I am not one of those people who over buy. You might probably laugh, but I will use things until they absolutely cannot be used any longer. Being a crafter at heart and never particularly wealthy, I like things that last. I've repaired broken necklaces, hats, clothing, shoes, dolls, blankets, belts, you name it. If it could be glued back together or sewn back together odds are that I repaired it. My fabric scraps that are too small for making doll outfits from are given to schools to do art projects with. Components left over from projects are saved and re-used in something else down the line. And if you think I'm accumulating stuff in a giant hoard, I'm not because I have a rule never to purchase something unless it is for a current project and I always look at what I have before I purchase more. This is not easy as many things call out to me when I'm shopping for fabric and such, but if I know I won't be able to sew the idea right away then I make myself walk past. Storing fabric is never my objective. I once had a friend that would always tell me that she had boxes upon boxes of fabric in a storage unit that she could sew things from and always quoted thousands of dollars worth. One day we went to that storage unit, the fabric was covered in dust, smelled wet or musty, and had been eaten away by rats. Thousands and thousands down the drain. Instead of "Hide More", this will be a "Use what you have more" as the correct response. I hope we are all looking towards the future and do what ever we can to minimize waste and excessiveness. Purchase dolls and clothes because you love them and can care for them and want them to continue on. Keep dolls out of the trash and stop purchasing things that are made to break or be discarded. Use your items until they wear out, not because something new and flashy is out. Better world tomorrow.