Doll-A-Day 2017 #8: My Franken-Kurhn Doll

  Today's doll is not so much a doll as a...head?

The story is this: I was looking at Kurhn dolls, and I quite liked them. but I couldn't find one that had the combination of price,body type,clothes,hair colour and eyes that I wanted. Eventually I found a Kurhn looking head on Ebay,which had dark auburn hair, brown eyes, and pink cheeks. The best part? With shipping the head cost me only $1.12!

  Of course, being just a head, it was going to need a body. I was hoping one of my Liv dolls would have the right skin type for it. Then I had to worry that the head would fit properly.

Luckily it did!

This Liv's hands are starting to go yellow though!

Her head is still nice and posable, and the skin tone matches nicely,(Except for the fact that the hands on the Liv doll have faded to a slightly yellowish colour.).

I checked, and the heads don't seem to be available on Ebay any more. But there are some on Aliexpress. In fact, what appears to be this head is on Aliexpress right now for 76 cents,with free shipping!(Wow! I feel cheated!)

There is also what looks like this head with shorter hair...

... and this head with shorter hair and hair pieces. (Did they make the hair pieces from the hair they cut off?) Just go to aliexpress and look for 'doll head'. They may offer more hair colours. I didn't go very far, because these heads were some of the first that came up. I was wary of Aliexpress for a while, but Ivy has had pretty good luck with the stuff she's ordered. Of course, that's mainly been nail stampers.

    The problem with the description of the heads is, they are all described as having 'flaxen hair', even though they say the head in the picture is the one you get, although there may be a difference in colour due to lighting and your monitor. Now, as I always understood, 'flaxen' is pale blonde hair.The Merriam Webster dictionary describes flaxen as 'a pale yellowish colour' and Wikipedia says it's 'a pale yellowish gray colour named after flax seeds'. So I'll suggest a bit of caution here. But at that price, you won't have lost much if you get a hair colour you don't like.

But what kind of quality is this head?Well the vinyl is nice. It's smooth and the colour is nice. The face paint isn't hand done, but it is applied well and looks good.The colours are nice too,other than maybe that yellow eye shadow.

I love the colour of the hair. It looks fairly dark and single toned in some of these pictures, but it's not. It's a great dark auburn colour with almost a purpley tint.
 The hair is fairly thickly rooted,but it definitely wants to hang in the one direction it was rooted. 

It looks kind of sparse, but it took a bit a digging to uncover the roots. The hair itself is very thick. You can really see the red in it in these pictures with the flash.

The thickness is part of what makes the hair not want to cooperate. You are not going to want to do an upsweep with this hair.

But if you are fine with the hair style the doll has, you'll probably be fine. The quality of the hair is going to be the major flaw with this head.

There's no guarantee yours will, but mine came with holes in the ears for earrings.(But no earrings.)

One of the people I follow on Flickr, Redmermaidwerewolf, had put a Kurhn head on an Ever After High Apple White body, and it looks really nice too. Of course, I doubt very much these are actual Kurhn heads. Most probably they are only heads copied from Kurhn heads. Having said that, now 

there's the question,is it ethical to buy these if they are counterfeit heads? They could be cheap heads made by Kurhn,that didn't meet their quality standards and so they don't sell them under the Kurhn name, or that are sold off to a cheapo company to finish, which would account for the hair.

 

  I'm pretty happy with this girl, even if I did pay more than I could have.

  So I'll see you tomorrow for another doll.