My Makie doll arrived!

A Makie doll by MakieLab.

The Makie doll that I'd first posted about here arrived.  She actually showed up before Christmas, but I've spent the past week with my mom in another city, so couldn't post before now. She's so cute! I have to admit, when she first arrived, I wasn't *quite* in love with her. I'd ordered the medium ("caramel") skintone and black eyes, and the results weren't quite what I'd expected. For one, the skintone ended up being darker than I thought it would be. That's fine. ... It's gorgeous, like a sun-kissed tan. For another, the black eyes turned out more alienesque than I was expecting. They didn't look at all alien in their make-a-doll program. I had a Greek grandfather who had eyes that were so dark brown they were almost black, and I guess I expected them to look a bit like that. Nope. 

Here's what she looked like when she first arrived. It didn't help that I gave her almond-shaped eyes, which managed to intensify the alien look.

 

I turned the eyes so they were side-glancing, and it looked much better. They have heads like Asian ball-jointed dolls, which means they have a headcap that opens and a hollow head, so you can change their eyes and wigs. They aren't actually ball-jointed, though. Here she is next to her make-a-doll picture. The shape of the face, eyes and mouth are fairly close, although the face looks a little thinner in the cartoon portrait.  I love her lips!

I thought I'd try her in some other eyes. I had some 16mms already, so I tried those first. Here she is in 16mm Masterpiece Polymer eyes.

She looks very alert, here.

 

I noticed Makies' original eyes seem to be 18mms, so I ordered some 18mm Secrist Real eyes in a few different colors. Once I switched her to the 18mm "Victorian Blue" eyes (below), her personality popped out and I was smitten. By the time I took this photo, I'd also added some watercolor pencil to her eyelids, so this is her default face paint, but enhanced slightly.

And here she is in 18mm Secrist eyes in "Brown-Green." This is an absolutely great color! I might leave her in these for a while. They look beautiful with this skin tone.

 

By the way, all the wigs she wears in these pictures are all MakieLab wigs.  (They wear a size 7-8".)  Right after I ordered, they put all their wigs and clothes on sale for half price, so I ended up getting a whole bunch of these wigs for roughly $6 apiece as a separate order. You can't even get wigs that cheap on eBay! The quality was surprisingly nice for the price, too. They lay nicely, with few flyaway hairs, and look great on the doll. Very pleased with them.

My girl has the new injection-moulded (IM) plastic body. Its posing is quite good. It *is* a bit shinier than the 3D-printed head, though, which might drive some people crazy. I've heard you can use a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser (sold in the cleaning supplies aisle in grocery stores) to buff the body a bit to reduce shine. I haven't tried it yet. I saw a picture of the results online, and it seemed to work great.

The color match between head and body is pretty good. Apparently when they first started using the new bodies, there were some initial problems with color matching, but they seem to have worked out the kinks. I don't have any complaints about mine.

So here's my awesome little Makie doll. Hope you like her. :)