Hello hello! I'm still waiting on my new bottles of sealant which is driving me crazy. I'd really love to finish up the girls I have partially done and start new ones as well. In the mean time I decided to work on trying to salvage some other dolls I have laying around. I have about 15 dolls that are what you'd consider "custom bait". They have damaged face paint, missing parts, or fried hair- perfect for wiping and starting fresh. In this post I want to talk about the best way I know how to fix up greasy doll hair.
I'm sure anyone who is interested in vinyl dolls is familiar with the awful state their hair is often in when unboxed. Above is an example of a horrible case. Sometimes it's so greasy that it can't be saved and it needs to be chopped all off. It's such a hassle to have to remove hair and replace it with a reroot or a wig so I like to try my best to fix it.
There are a few methods to removing the grease. I think the most popular is probably the baby powder method, shown above. By sprinkling baby powder in the doll's hair and brushing it through it's able to absorb some of the grease and remove most of the sticky feeling. Although this method works most of the time, I really disliked the idea that whatever residue which caused the doll's hair to get greasy was still in there and was only masked by the baby powder. Below is a photo of what the hair looks like after I've brushed a few coats of baby powder through it. As you can see, it's still stringy and, even though it looks a lot better, it still feels sticky. Also, the baby powder is so hard to brush through dark hair like Draculaura's. It's always visible no matter how much I work it through the hair. It makes dolls with dark hair look dusty and dirty.
I decided to try something new. Ater brushing baby powder through the dolls' hair I doused it with rubbing alcohol and then rinsed. It actually got most of the remaining residue out. I repeated this twice on Clawdeen and her hair turned out almost new. I'm actually very shocked! It's almost like it was never greasy to begin with. Here are some photos of what the hair looks like after the two rounds of the baby powder and rubbing alcohol "treatment".
There is no more sticky residue and the hair is separated and isn't stringy. It looks as good as new! This seems to be a fix to the stubborn grease problem. My exact steps were....
- Brush out and remove tangles in the greasy hair as best as possible
- Optional: use boiling water to straighten the hair and let dry
- Sprinkle baby powder generously on hair and brush through. Repeat until it's no longer sticky
- Saturate hair with rubbing alcohol and brush through
- Rinse with warm water
- Repeat as needed
It's a super simple process that really makes a huge difference in the quality of your doll's hair. It might be hard to tell from the photos, but it feels so much better! I think I'll continue using this method to fix my dolls' hair in the future. It'll definitely save me from having to rewig or reroot a lot of dolls!
I hope this was helpful to someone looking for a better solution to the greasy hair problem! :)
