Adventures in Deconstructing Barbie

 Wow. I did a lot of research into removing Barbie's head and it scared me. Article after article, blog post after blog post pointed out how hard it is to remove her head. How fragile her neck is. How careful you have to be if you don't want to break her. How doing it successfully is a matter of luck not skill. In the end I was nearly too scared to try.

 But I did try and honestly I have no idea what all the fuss is about. It's not hard. They can't break that easily since I pulled off eight heads without being gentle at all and not one body broke.

 I filled a plastic container with hot tap water and left the dolls heads soaking in it for about five minutes then with the help of a mini screwdriver from an eyeglass repair kit, the heads came right off. A couple were more difficult, but I found by putting them back in the hot water for another minute or two, the vinyl softened up enough to make it a piece of cake.

 On the other hand the neck pegs were all gross with globs of glue and the mini screwdriver I used is now absolutely disgusting from the horrible glue their heads are filled with. (Actually at the moment it's soaking in white vinegar to hopefully melt the glue.) I am already filled with hatred for that glue! It got everywhere! It's disgusting and spreading and too bloody awful for words!

 After I'd done some decapitating I decided to rip the hair out of one of the Barbies that I'm thinking of rerooting. That particular game has changed. My old method for that was to cut the hair short, pull as much as I could out from the outside of the head using tweezers, then pull the rest out from the inside. It took a while but it wasn't at all taxing. Now! I found I couldn't pull ANY hair out from the outside because the inside was so chunky with glue and to pull it out from the inside I was having to soften the glue in hot water and then almost gouge at the hair plugs inside the head! The glue would go soft and runny whenever it was warm, then resolidify as soon as it cooled. As I said before it got EVERYWHERE! I feel weird about the idea of kids playing with these dolls if their heads are going to be leaking sticky, gross, glue whenever they get warm.

 Only one of the Barbies has her new head so far. I ran out of time. But this was the doll that inspired the whole project. I loved her face but her weird transparent pink and glittery body, with flesh coloured knees for some ungodly reason, made her unusable in my eyes. Now she has a tall body and even though the colour match isn't perfect, she still looks a million times better.

I just wish Mattel would stop ruining perfectly good toys. Finally they stop woth the gross sticky plastisizer leaking legs on everything and immediately introduce heads filled with super gross, hopefully not extremely toxic, glue. What is wrong with them?