I wanted to post some general comments on the quality of the dolls in this new Truly Me release. Having interacted with a number of dolls at the store and unboxed five different numbers once we got home, we wanted to share some of our feelings about the quality of the dolls we’ve handled. These observations may or may not apply to the doll you receive in the mail, but we’ve been impressed with the consistency of manufacture in this line of new TM dolls. This hasn’t always been our experience before with new releases, so it seems appropriate to mention the good as well as the not-so-good.
HEAD SHAPES
You’ve seen me mention many times before that we had to look through a lot of boxes to find a round face or a thin face. That definitely was not our experience with the Columbus stock this time for these new TM dolls. We didn’t see one instance of round or thin faces within a certain number. All of the dolls of each individual number had the same shape of face. Don’t misunderstand me. All 25 dolls did not look alike. But, for instance, if you looked through all the #117s in the boxes, there was no difference in the shape of the heads, none particularly round or thin. I firmly believe that this entire first run of new TM dolls must have been made in the same factory, unlike previous AG dolls, which always show signs (like face shapes) of having been made in multiple places. The consistency in head shapes, face paint and eyeball issues is unlikely to happen unless the dolls have all been made in the same place. Also, if you look closely at the right shoulder seam, every one of the new TM dolls in our house right now has the same lack of stuffing on the shoulder near the neck. (This accounts for the amount of head tilts in the store, because it’s usually the stuffing in the shoulders that causes one.) This is not a defect or even a big deal. You can just start pinching the shoulder area where it dips down a bit and adjusting the head. Personally, I like an occasional head tilt. If you don’t, you’ll have no trouble working it back into shape. This is not a defect, just a quirk of manufacturing.
BODY FABRIC
The body fabric is the nice stuff they’ve been using since they changed back to good body fabric. This should not be compared to that thin, awful body fabric that they tried a couple of years ago. What they used in this release has a nice quality and feel. And while we’re at it, I want to mention that the dye job on the two 30-tone dolls we just got (TM113 and TM123) is the closest match I’ve ever seen between face and body (shown in second photo above). And the dark skin vinyl-to-fabric has always had room for improvement. Very nice!
FABRIC BODY SIZE (NOT OVERALL HEIGHT OF DOLL)
I’d like to address the building concerns over a possible downsizing of the new 18″ TM dolls, as compared to previous releases. Since we have a 24-year range of AG dolls in the house, I grabbed a few from each era and started measuring. I just finished with 12+ dolls, ranging from a first-run Kit to four of the new TM dolls. I even dumped a Lea and a Marie Grace (both known in their time to be petite) into the lot to keep it fair. As we’d all expect, those two dolls were about 1/4″ shorter in the body than the others, which ALL measured 6-3/4″ from the pit of the throat at the base of the neck to the center of the crotch. So, we can safely assume that Mattel has not shortened the bodies in this new release. Measuring the waists (real waists, where you’d measure your own) on the same dolls, everyone but Lea measured 11-1/4 to 11-1/2″. Of the four new dolls (117, 123, 119 and 115), two measured a full 11-1/4″, the other two a full 11-1/2″. If you’ve ever tried to re-stuff a doll, you know that a 1/4″ variation is quite good.
That only leaves us with one last place to measure: the shoulder length (neck to shoulder, on the seam). Eureka! This might explain why some dolls feel smaller or don’t wear their clothes quite as well as they should. So, let’s get started. The majority of pre-2020 dolls in our house have a 1-5/16″ shoulder seam on both sides. All five of our new TM dolls measure 1-3/16″ on the shoulder seam. Having given this a lot of thought and looking through the cupboard, it appears to me that this change was made between the winter of 2019/2020 and June 2021. We have several CYOs bought between 2017 and later 2019, and they measure 1-5/16″. We have a Nanea doll (Toni) that we bought in June 2021, and her shoulders measure only 1-2/16″ (the smallest one that I’ve found here so far). Then we bought Corinne in January 2022, and she measures 1-3/16″. We don’t have a doll bought later than 2019 with the 1-5/16″ shoulders. That’s a 10% reduction on each shoulder seam over an 18-month period.
Let’s take it one step further. We measured a #119 from shoulder to shoulder, across the chest, and came up with 4-3/8″. We measured the same space on a doll with a 2008 body tag from mid-2000s and came up with 5″. My special Nanea is on a 2017 CYO body and measures 4-7/8″. The other Nanea (Toni) mentioned above with the tiny shoulders measures only 4-7/16″ across the chest, shoulder to shoulder, but is still 1/16″ larger there than the #119. We measured a TM26 on a c. 2005 body, and she also measured 5″. The shocker for us was Bunty (you all know Bunty from the Sheep Shop and Wool Week). I call her a “thread paper”. She’s always seemed such a tiny little thing, compared to the others. Diminutive. She wears all the small clothes. We handpicked what we thought was a small body (c. 2010). Guess I’ll have to get a different nickname for her, though, because she measured 5″ from shoulder to shoulder! And she measures the same 6-3/4″ from neck to crotch and 11-3/8″ at the waistline! What?! When you hold her, she even feels small. I don’t get it. Is it the way the stuffing is . . . stuffed? (Poor Bunty. She’s sitting on my desk all in a tither, worried that the world is now going to know her most private of measurements, that Harold might read this, and that she might have to go on a diet and give up sheep ice cream for a while. Boo hoo!)
The short list for anyone else who’s googly-eyed after reading this. Mom is a numbers cruncher and loves this sort of stuff. I have to work at it. It’s going to take me a while to get over Bunty’s plight. Anyway,
(1) the new dolls do not have shorter bodies;
(2) neither do they have smaller waists; but
(3) they do have narrower shoulders, creating 13%-smaller chest measurements.
In people terms, this would be the equivalent of a person with a 40″ chest measurement being reduced to only 35″. It would explain clothes fitting a little differently. Since we haven’t yet had a problem with newer clothes fitting our older dolls (except for the ridiculously short back seams, of course), we have to assume that AG hasn’t reduced their clothing sizes at the same rate.
HEIGHT
There are many factors which affect the overall height of your doll: neck height, body height, leg length and height of the head. We have dolls that are an inch or more taller than others. Harold, in fact, is on the tallest body you ever saw. Obviously, it was a “defective” body, but we LOVE the look it gives him. Eliot, on the other hand, is on the dumpiest and most marshmallow-y body you could ever hope to find. Again, something went wrong in the factory, but we chose it for him because it suits his personality to a tee.
LIMB TIGHTNESS
You all know what I mean. You take your doll out of the box, and her limbs are so loose that you know you’ll have to have them restrung before you really get going with her. American Girl has had a problem with that for years, now, and it’s only been getting worse. For a while, they’d been using the cheapest cord in the limbs, and it breaks down quickly (if it even makes it into the box without being too stretched out). We’re hopeful that they’ve fixed this, though. We didn’t find one doll with this problem in the new TM dolls we brought home. Doesn’t mean there aren’t any. Just means we didn’t get them. And Elizabeth is happy that she doesn’t have to restring so many dolls right out of the box!
EYES
The classic molds in the store today all had the same eye issue: one eye round, the other almond shaped, which made for one eye looking a bit smaller than the other. This has been a common issue since the classic mold was modified and thinned down, but it bears repeating.
All but the Addy and Jess face molds (and TM122) in this new Truly Me line have an issue with eye alignment. In general, one (sometimes both) eye on each doll has a small amount of white showing under the iris. (Meaning that the iris doesn’t come down behind the lower opening of the vinyl eye socket.) Going back over our doll “mug shots”, we find that this problem surfaced with the Joss release and appears to have gotten worse. We looked through a lot (more than half) of the boxes in the store today and noticed that when the eyes are in a sleeping position, many of them had been inserted crooked. So, when you laid the doll down, the eyelashes were often at weird angles and not pointing in the same direction (let alone parallel to the eye sockets). It was most often found on the left eyes, which is the eye that most often shows a bit of white between the iris and the edge of the lower eye socket.
To give you an idea of how many boxes you might have to look through to find one with two good eyes, I took photos of a number of the TM #116-119 that were available on just one shelf the other day at the Columbus store. These give an idea of the different looks available. Sorry for the crazy lighting, but photographing through the box window is tough!
Click photos to enlarge.
