How We Choose Our AG Dolls

People have asked what it is that I look for when I go through the entire stock of AG dolls in their boxes at the store. Good question. Let’s say, first off, that it isn’t the same thing my sister looks for. Sis and I were raised to embrace “be different and think outside the box”. Even as identical twins, that works with our personalities in a totally different style. It’s one more thing that makes us a great pair when we work together on something. We share one shopping trait, though. Without even thinking about it, the two of us are never buying a doll. We’re buying six different parts of an AG doll: vinyl head with face paint, eyes, limbs, cloth body, wig and outfit. In that order. The last two are of minor import, but those first four “parts” have to work for both of us. This isn’t always easy, either. Sometimes, it’s AG’s problem; other times, it’s our expectations at loggerheads.

Elizabeth looks at the execution of the manufacturing. Since she’s re-strung and re-stuffed more than 300 dolls, she doesn’t care if things are a bit wonky, as long as it isn’t defective manufacturing. Head tilts don’t bother her at all, since it’s just a matter of how they packed the shoulders, and she can either make or eliminate that in any correctly-sewn AG doll. She doesn’t care if the limbs are loose, but she’s fiendishly critical about misshapen limbs and bodies (think Maritza’s first run of twisted bodies). Since she’s not as comfortable with face painting (she’s done a few), lip paint is a big thing with her. She does NOT like poorly-executed lip paint. Elizabeth has eye-swapped enough dolls for us (most of mine and hers–“be different”, remember) that she doesn’t bring a doll home without looking carefully at eyeball alignment and the form of the eye socket. She spends a lot of time at home with new dolls just out of the box, listening to Mom and me saying, “Just a taddy bit to the NE corner. Okay, now it needs a hair to the south.” We do this a lot, because eyeballs can move with a lot of handling. (Think Wool Week.) When I’m doing 50+ wigs on one doll, it can shift them a bit, too. The shape of the head (round or long-and-thin) jumps out at her if she’s even just passing a row of boxes. (For the record, she likes ’em thin, while I like ’em round.)

On the other hand, I appreciate the fact that she and Mom are doing that side of the doll picking. I trust that they’ll tell me if something’s wrong or explain what to watch for. What am I looking for? Eye contact. Sounds silly, I know, but the gaze is everything to me. Having taken many thousands of photos of AG dolls (alone and in groups), I know before looking which face mold is going to be looking where. For instance, Josefina, Kaya and Jess molds always look down. It’s sometimes frustrating to photograph these dolls, unless you come up from a slightly lower angle than usual, which can distort the face if you’re not careful. May not be noticeable to others, but I see it and the camera is an ever harsher critic. Sis can sometimes help a doll’s gaze a bit, with a little eyeball adjusting, but it can’t be totally corrected on those three molds. It’s the way their eye sockets have been formed. These dolls don’t generally work well when you’re doing a tete-a-tete with a doll of a different mold, so it’s important to me to know before we buy  who a doll’s main companion might be. They work all right in group shots, as long as you’re not shooting them face-on. For the rest of the molds, it can sometimes be just as frustrating. They’re just vinyl dolls being made in a facility with little or no quality control. Things happen when no one’s checking. (Don’t forget, AG thinks it’s making “toys”.) So, what am I searching for at the store? I look through every box and stare them straight in the eyes. And I want them to be staring straight back at me. That means eyelashes that aren’t sitting at an angle and two eyeballs (in a vinyl socket that fits correctly) looking straight out in the same direction.

Once Sis and I each get our own must-haves out of the way, we group up and go over some of the major points together. Lip paint has to hit the lips on center and fill the molded parts. Eye sockets have to be as even as possible (all AG dolls have one eye lower than the other), and visible eye posts are a deal breaker. Legs have to be the same length to each other and cloth bodies need to be properly sewn (difficult to tell in the box, but there are sometimes telltale signs). Once we’re home, we change out the zipties for strings that Elizabeth makes, but we do try to check for ziptie breakage (around the cloth neckline) in the store. Wigs aren’t the same deal they used to be, since the wigs produced the last couple of years are hit-or-miss on quality. There’ve been some nice ones and some cheap ones, so we try to find a display doll whose wig can be felt and flipped around. (Harder these days, because the display dolls are preserved in braid spray.) We do look for wig placement. Especially if we’re choosing a doll for someone else. The outfit? Hmm. We don’t use very many AG clothes as they’re matched in the boxes (that “be different” mentality again), and AG clothes and shoes are really cheap these days, in our opinion, so we don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it. As long as they look like they don’t have manufacturing defects, we move on.

This leaves us with one last word of advice. Whether you’re in the store shopping for a doll or just received your online order, the FIRST (and I repeat, the FIRST) thing to do is look her over carefully with the lid off the box. If you’re in the store, sit on a bench and remove the lid. Don’t try to twist the doll or manhandle her to see the back. If everything seems fine, then pay and go straight to your car. Before you leave the parking lot, cut the doll out of the box and inspect everything you couldn’t see before. If there is a hidden defect on the back of the wig, doll, or outfit, go right back into the store with your receipt and show it to them. But I mean DEFECT. They won’t return a doll just because you don’t like it now that you’ve seen it out of the box. And the staff are pretty savvy about what constitutes “defect”. If you’ve just received your online order, do the same thing. Remove the lid and look at her without mangling her packaging. The plastic window on the boxes can hide a lot of small defects. The eye issues are much more noticeable when viewed without the lid on the box. We’ve seen deformed wigs, mangled clothes, one leg longer than the other, bad wig placement, faulty tooth/lip paint, etc. without having to remove the doll from the box. Once you’ve taken a doll out of the box, AG will usually not let you return it unless there is a manufacturing defect.

We weren’t always like this. When we “rediscovered American Girl” in 2017 (Sis and I got our first dolls in 1995), we could barely tell one head mold from the other and didn’t understand people when they said they couldn’t “bond” with their dolls. Actually, we thought that was a weird comment when we first heard it. “How does one bond with a doll?” we asked. Our old PC and early Mattel dolls from the ’90s had awful eyes and some strange body parts. And we didn’t mind one bit when we were young. But we’re a little older now (ha ha), and kids have been raised for decades with touched-up and high-def photos of people and dolls. They expect more. We see a lot of online photos of people’s “just arrived dolls” and are upset that AG would even deliver dolls like that.

We’ve been talking about it a lot lately among ourselves. What will we do when the Columbus store is closed down? No one here wants to come out and say it, but we probably will be done with new American Girl releases at that point. Mattel has no quality control in their AG line and digital designers who struggle to get even the basic proportions right (and don’t always get them right anymore). For now, we’re glad that Columbus still has another year to go on its lease.

So, what if you can’t get to a store (especially at the rate AG is closing them down)? If you identify with us, you should consider using a Personal Shopper at one of the big stores. The doll doesn’t cost more, and shipping is just like the online site. I know a number of people who’ve been using a PS for years and are very happy with them. You can, of course, always ask someone who is going to a store to pick one up for you.

A lot of people comment on how beautiful our dolls are. We work very hard to make that happen. It takes a lot of time and effort from three people (Mom’s the springboard for our ideas) to find parts that work well together. And when we find them already put together for us in one box. Well . . . that’s a magical moment . . . And it’s magical because it doesn’t happen very often.

A quick word about doll buying. Buying a doll is no different than buying any other decorative product. I know it sounds like we’re being super critical, since every single person alive has all of the defects we’ve just listed (e.g., one eye smaller or lower, one leg longer, off-center lips, small noses, big noses, short noses, hairline placement, et al). Actually, as a family, we are very not critical of the way people look. Our parents raised us to be “color blind” and embrace the fact that every single person ever born has a different combo of features than everyone else. I was probably 30 years old before I used the word “ugly” (it was a “four-letter word” in our home), because my mother would have washed my mouth out with soap if she’d heard me say it. She taught us that no one was born ugly and that there was always something fine about a person’s features. As identical twins (so identical that blood tests are not available that go far enough to register even one minute number different in our blood), we confuse people all the time with which one we are. Funny that, because my head is round and Elizabeth’s is thin. Our noses are different. Our mouths aren’t even close in shape or size (Lizzy’s would definitely be returnable as a manufacturing defect). Our eyes are different shape. Our hair and hairlines are different. (If you were selecting my hair for wig quality, you’d definitely be allowed to return it as a defect. Sis’s hairline and cowlicks would definitely have “defect” stamped on them .) Our body shapes are completely opposite, our height an inch different, and legs that don’t even look like they belong on sisters. Even our hair color is ever so slightly different. And we’re IDENTICAL twins! And we look alike, too! Go explain.

Anyway, I’m telling you this because I want to address the feeling of guilt that some people verbalize when we start picking the doll features apart. We’re talking about dolls here. Not people. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting your doll to look like you want her to look: beautiful in your eyes. The worst disservice AG ever did was to tell the public that you need to buy a doll that looks exactly like you. “Just Like You” and “Truly Me” are names that only breed a self-centered outlook in young minds. Parents get hung up on it. We’ve seen it countless times in the store and when giving dolls to girls. The little girl wants Maryellen or TM#82, but the parents are upset and won’t buy it because it doesn’t look like the girl. If the little girl wants a look-alike, it’s great. But it’s not always like that. And the little girl ends up with a doll she doesn’t like, usually leaving the store yelling or crying. We’ve seen it over and over. All this to say that, as adults, we’re buying dolls to look nice and make us happy. And little girls should learn to appreciate nice things and take care of them. It’s no different than buying an expensive necklace. Would you pay $115 for a necklace that had sloppy parts and misshapen pieces? Of course, you wouldn’t. Please remember that no one is critiquing a person here. And I’m glad of it, because Sis and I would give people a lot to talk about. And that would not make us happy. So, let’s remember that we’re buying an expensive doll, and we deserve to have it look nice. Whatever that means to each of us.

Even with experience, it can be difficult to get a real feel for the full look and personality of a doll when they’re strapped down in a box, with those plastic bands around their necks and hair plastered into a tight net. Here are some pictures showing dolls new in their boxes with hairnets, followed by a picture of the same doll once they’re out of the box and relaxed a bit.

Click on images to enlarge.