It's Still Just a Doll! Choosing Barbies for Play or Collecting
Feb 16 '01
The Bottom Line Criteria for selecting a play doll should be the same as criteria for a collector's doll: the one you want to play with the most.
And just the other day I was thinking to myself "if I only had a dime for every time I've answered this question in an email!" and here there is a topic on Epinions. How nice to put my two main web endeavors together in one neat package (and how nice that I can link from my site to this review and save myself some email responses...)
As a Barbie collector, nothing has amazed me so much as the cultural phenomenon that seems to surround 11-and-a-half inches of vinyl. I talk to other moms who seem to be split into two camps: the "every little girl must have a Barbie in her formative years" and the "Barbie is a symbol of male oppression and provides a role model for nothing more than bubble-headed women and eating disorders" groups.
I receive at least three emails a week asking me how to pick out dolls for either children or collecting, so this seems to be a fairly hot topic.
Play Dolls
I don't think that Barbie provides a poor "role model" for children. As a 30-year-old Barbie collector and having had an eating disorder for a large portion of my life, I can honestly say that Barbie has nothing to do with any of that. Not once did I ever think a doll had a realistic human body about them, from the chunky, large-headed Cabbage Patch Kids to my Superstar Barbie. Nor did I model any of my career choices (and there have been many) on the Barbie fashion model of my youth.
To me, Barbie was a tool that allowed me to imagine other worlds. Rarely were any of my Barbies models or any other type of celebrity. They were doctors and lawyers and teachers long before Mattel had attributed any sort of career to Barbie.
If you haven't been in a toy store lately, take a stroll down that long pink aisle. Barbie has much more varied career choices than when I was a child: doctor, President, paleontologist, teacher, astronaut, Olympic athlete, and dentist, to name a few. No longer are Barbie's friends of other races done with different color vinyl and the same face mold. Barbie has African-American, Hispanic, and Asian friends, all with their own face molds. She has a disabled friend in a wheelchair, friends with glasses, and even a Dolls of the World line of friends in modified native costumes with short blurbs on that country's culture right on the box. All these dolls are priced within a reasonable limit for parents, and you can usually find a doll which "looks like me" which is what I wanted more than anything as a child.
Choosing a Barbie for your child (and I'm a firm believe that boys should have Barbies if they want them to) should involve more than just grabbing one. It can be a great opportunity to interact with your child, to discuss hopes and dreams for the future, and discover what your child finds interesting and admirable. Is your child interested in art? There is a Generation Girl Barbie who is an artist. Interested in music? There have been rock star Barbies, country-western star Barbies, and even one play set with a Barbie piano.
Collecting Barbie
Ah, here is the hottest topic of them all... collecting Barbie. When Barbie turned 35 years old back in 1994, Barbie collecting took off, and suddenly grown-ups buying and playing with dolls went mainstream. The dolls of our childhood became a Holy Grail for collectors, and new dolls were bought and preserved in original condition, right down to the ranking of box condition.
The problem? I receive more email asking what dolls I think will attain value later on than I do about anything else having to do with Barbie collecting. I have received emails from parents who "invested" in Barbies for their children's college educations, only to find out that the dolls weren't even selling for their original purchase price on the secondary market 5 and 10 years later.
My first piece of advice is to NOT try to collect for an investment. Let me repeat that: Barbies are not investments. Some of them, such as the Harley Davidson Barbie, were released in small numbers, and their value appreciated VERY quickly. Most dolls don't show that kind of jump, and there is no way to easily anticipate which of Mattel's releases in any given year will have that kind of meteoric rise in value, if even one of them does.
I still collect dolls, and I have a few huge boxes in my basement that I plan on thinning out. Why? I don't have the room to display them all, and hiding dolls in boxes in my basement doesn't sound like a fun collection.
I see advice all the time on collecting Barbies, leaving them in their boxes, and preserving the boxes. Why? What fun is that? The furor over NRFB (Never Removed From Box) Barbies had to do with rarities of early-edition dolls found untouched in their boxes. With the large numbers of dolls released each year, and the hundreds of thousands of collectors, there are SCADS of newer dolls still in their boxes. They are common, and will probably never attain the same type of value that you would see with a first-edition Barbie from 1959 still in the box.
My advice to collectors is to choose the Barbies that you enjoy OUT of the box. With new packaging, some of these dolls can even be damaged if left in the box, due to too-tight elastic denting the vinyl, or adhesive tape melting onto the doll or its outfit.
The doll you should buy is the one you can't BEAR to leave in the box. It's the one that has hair you must comb, accessories you must play with, and an outfit you must change. It's the doll you stick in your bag on your way to a doll show so you can find a vendor who hand-sews a custom-designed dress that would be just perfect for you. It's the doll you think has a wonderful face, but screams out to be customized, with your own dress design, hair styling, and maybe even face repaint.
In short, the criteria for selecting a play doll for a child should be the same as the criteria for a collector's doll for an adult: it should be the one you want to play with the most.
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
pippadaisy
|
 - Top 50 |
|
Reviews written: 1084
Trusted by: 177 members
About Me:
Divorce seriously cuts into the amount of time for reviewing.
|
|
|
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.