After weeks of waiting, American Girl’s new 1920s Historical doll is finally here! We went down yesterday to American Girl Place in Easton (Columbus, Ohio), arriving about two hours after the store opened. There were a lot of new Claudie dolls on the shelves, and we looked at every doll in every box!
The Columbus store had all the currently available Claudie items on display, plus the three Harlem Fashion Row outfits (although those three were not available for purchase). My review and photos on the displays and Claudie’s collection will be posted in the next day or so. Right now, I’m going to give a quick overview of just the Doll and her Meet Outfit. I know that a number of people are waiting for this, so I wanted to get something up today for those who want to order now.
Claudie definitely has a new, unique face mold. In fact, when you’re holding her with other dolls, she looks a little bit like practically every AG-doll face mold all rolled into one. Weird but true. She’s definitely her own face mold, though, and doesn’t look exactly like any one other doll. Also, she looks totally different from every angle. Take a careful look at each of the face-on, three-quarter and profile pictures below. I’ve never seen another AG doll that looks so different as you rotate her in your hands. And her skin tone is dark, like TM #80, #85, #91, Makena and Anniversary Addy. (It’s the #35 tone option in the CYO creator.) This is a very difficult skin tone to photograph and show in its true color. Most of the pictures I’ve seen posted online so far have her very overlit, almost appearing to have the lighter classic dark tone of dolls like Melody, Gabriela and TM #58. This is absolutely not the case! The photo below is pretty true to her real coloring and look when seen in real life.
And here are some pictures showing her standing with a variety of Addy-mold dolls from different eras and in different vinyl tones. (First and third photos taken without camera flash, second and fourth photos taken with flash. Big difference, so I thought I’d post both shots.)
Above left to right: TM #58 (c. 2010), TM #85, Claudie, custom Anniversary Addy, Pleasant Company Addy (1995).
Above left to right: Customized TM #58 (2017), TM #85, Claudie, custom Anniversary Addy, custom Beforever Addy.
As for buying a Claudie doll, I would really recommend ordering through one of AG’s personal shoppers or picking her out in person. There was a lot of variation from doll to doll, though the head shape itself was unusually consistent. Off-center lip paint is certainly her biggest issue. It’s all over the place, with a tendency to move too far to the right (the doll’s left). It was very hard to find four dolls that had well-centered (but not perfect) lips — out of about forty stocked dolls. The other issue that was quite prevalent was a “flat” bottom of the vinyl eye-socket rim; and it didn’t seem to happen to one side more than the other, showing up on the left and the right. Hard to explain, but a LOT of the dolls had one eye socket where the bottom “lid” area (edge of the opening) was not curved correctly and looked like a horizontal line. This meant that you could sometimes see more eyeball parts than you should. Her eyes are the brown decal style from Samantha and Ivy. Yea! I love them! And they’re the regular 16mm eye size (rather than the larger 18mm eyes used in GOTY Corinne), so they should be interchangeable with other American Girl doll eyes.
Click any images to enlarge.
Claudie’s wig has black curly hair, exactly like the wig on TM #85, just trimmed a bit shorter. It’s a beautiful, soft wig that falls just below the shoulders. The ends aren’t all fried looking, either, like some of the earlier options. If you’re comfortable with the curly hair, then I can’t recommend this enough. Definitely would NOT be great for young girls or anyone who wants to brush their doll’s hair.
Before moving on to her Meet Outfit review, I’d like to comment on the appearance of her ears and head. They look very large. It’s the first thing all three of us noticed when we walked up to the case in the store. It was that noticeable. And it’s no less obvious when seeing her with the other AG dolls here at home. While her body and limbs are the same size as other 18″ AG dolls, her head appears much larger. It even makes Corinne (who has a very large head compared to other face molds) look smaller. And her ears are visibly huge, with almost no sculpted detail to them (similar to Sonali). I’m planning on removing Claudie’s wig tomorrow to take the usual wig photos of her modeling a variety of styles, so I’ll post circumference measurements and photos of her head then. In the meantime, we compared some other measurements with several other face molds. For anyone else who’s crazy about statistics and customizing, hope this helps. The rest of you can skip to the next picture (smile)!
EAR LENGTH (top to bottom):
Nanea = 23mm
Kay & Josefina = 25 mm
Addy & Corinne = 26 mm
Claudie = 28 mm
EYES (outer edge of eye to outer edge):
Addy & Kaya = 51 mm
Nanea = 53mm
Claudie = 54mm
Corinne = 55mm
FACE (from front of ear over nose tip to front of ear):
Nanea = 129mm
Claudie = 132mm
Corinne = 133mm
Addy = 157mm (her ears sit waaaaay back on her head)
To illustrate the visual difference, here’s a picture showing her with several dolls with a variety of face molds.
Face molds, left to right: Classic, Josefina, Claudie, Sonali, Jess and Corinne.
Stay tuned for more comparisons between face molds which will post over the next couple of days.
MEET OUTFIT
Several people have asked if the stripes at the waistline matched up on all the dresses. No, they do not. We brought home four dolls to pick from. Two of the four have matched stripes (the one in the photos being one of them), and two of them do not match up at all. That wasn’t something I was looking for, so those are a random four outfits. We had SO much trouble finding four dolls with decently centered mouth paint that I wasn’t looking at the outfits at all, really. If this matters to you, you’ll want to pick in person.
Hope this helps when it comes to making decisions with your orders. If anyone has any questions, feel free to comment here or send a message. I’ll be posting face mold comparisons, head measurements, wig photos, etc., over the next couple of days. Wish I could be faster, but this takes a LOT of time to do right. Hasta manana!