The Frugal Blog

Doll enthusiasts and collectors know that one of our favorite pastimes is scrolling through AliExpress to see what weird hybrids and cast-offs they have available for sale. This is how the doll community discovered the Catwalk Kitties and the Trashion Alley dolls, and many of us have discovered different brands after they’ve been ripped off or sold as extra stock through the site.

This is also how I discovered UCanaan/Doris dolls a while back, but not before I had purchased a “factory” doll under a generic name, covered with a few defects here and there but otherwise fine. This used to be the most commonly found doll body sold under the “BJD” label that wasn’t actually a resin BJD, but now they seem to be using Xinyi bodies, which are slightly different. There's been some discussion about these in the doll community and how they're all rip-offs of the original Night Lolita dolls, and how these companies keep getting bought out and/or changed. I'm pretty ambivalent about it myself when it comes to non-resin dolls, because I suspect these companies trade and sell things to each other behind the scenes, and business tends to work differently over there, and we'll never really figure out what belongs to who.

Anyway, I paid a grand total of around $20 for this girl out of curiosity and then threw her in my closet after looking her over, because I didn’t particularly feel inspired by her at the time. I don't like to start work on a doll until I have a clear idea of what I'm aiming for, because I feel I run the risk of not liking the end result. Under the cut, I'll talk a bit more about my process and what I finally decided to do with this one.
Continue reading "Aliexpress 1/3 Doll Review and Customziation"