#FailFix Review [Pt.1] - The dolls that need a style saviour
Note: Click on pics to enlarge!
The new doll line of #FailFix features a never seen before attribute where playing with the doll starts with fixing it.
When these dolls were announced and I first started seeing teasers and ads, I'd already fallen in love. Because America always gets things first (I'm Australian), I sat back and waited for unboxing videos and reviews, did some research and inevitably solidified my love for them. I'd like to share that, so that you may make the decision yourself as to if you'd like to add them to your own collection, to gift them, or perhaps if they're suitable for your children.
In the #FailFix line, there are 6 characters; Dance.Stylz, PreppiPosh, Loves.Glam, SlayItDJ, Kawaii.Qtee and 2Dreami. White the others are simple style packs, 2Dreami is the 'Epic Colour and Style Makeover' set with far more included than the other 5. While 2Dreami includes more, the other 5 have a mystery element which she does not have.
They can be wearing an outfit and have makeup that can be one of 3;
- Day, the standard and seemingly most common look
- Sparkle, a glitter coated variant of Day with different makeup, and
- Evening, a completely different dress and very exuberant makeup in comparison to the others.
I will be discussing just three simple style packs in this post, as they're the only ones I have on hand.
Currently the singles are priced at;
$25 at Target,
$29 at Big W (I got mine from here before Target had them), and
$34.99 at Mr Toys.
2Dreami is available at;
Target for $49, and
Mr Toys for $59.99.
The three girls in desperate need of a makeover I have with me today are Dance.Stylz, Kawaii.Qtee, and SlayItDJ. For the purpose of this post and making my life a little easier when typing their names out, I'll be calling them Dance, Kawaii and DJ respectively. I picked up these three because I suspect they may be the ones to disappear from shelves first due to their style and look.
In the box, we see each doll has messy hair, gelled stiff to the nines with product, embedded with shoes and jewelry. The faceplate makeup is smudged and each of their different facial expressions tells they are upset. They all have a bubble face mask and wear a plastic dressing gown covering the mystery dress, both varying in colour per doll. Also included are hair elastics, varying hair accessories to help make the hairstyle, a teal-green brush, and a clear 3-piece stand. If it's not obvious already, these dolls have insert-eyes that follow you! While some may find this creepy, I think it's incredibly cool.
Apologies in advance, I'm very sorry for the lack of images of the accessories and such. I live-streamed the outfit reveal and went straight into styling the girls immediately if that's a gauge of how much I love them and how keen I was to dig into fixing them!
On the back of the box there's the rundown of what you need to do to help this poor doll, but my focus is immediately drawn to the 3 variant styles you can get. Left to right is the 'Day' look, 'Sparkle' and 'Evening'. The image is actually quite small on the box and is quite difficult to make out small details, especially the makeup, so I'll review what I've got rather than try to describe what I don't have. This does mean though, technically, there are 19 dolls to collect - 3x6 plus 2Dreami (if you want a second Dreami so that both outfits are being worn, I suppose that makes 20). That's a lot of dolls! And money!
@DANCE.STYLZ
First of all we have Dance, the one and only, very clearly, dark skinned doll in the line. The plastic used has a light pearlescence to it and looks very nice in person.
Variant:- I received the standard Day variant of Dance. While she is not my favourite, she's by far one of the easiest to fix. The braided hair certainly helps that for sure; less fly aways, and it's an easy pull back into a ponytail.
Fail Look:- Dance's Fail look includes a purple plastic dressing gown and a pink face mask, in addition to her fail faceplate. The faceplate has smeared orange and brown earthy-tone eyeshadow and lipstick. Her hair is sectioned into 4, twisted upwards and set into place. I could even see the clamp marks where they fixed the sections into place for setting.
Fix Look:- Dance has dark brown hair, highlights of hot pink, all micro braided into tiny strands and feels like soft textured stringy noodles. She has gorgeous light-brown eyes, thick moulded eyelashes with some extra printed on thin lashes, shifting purple to yellow gradient eyeshadow and lovely pink lipstick on very full sculpted lips. A very fine detail most people will miss are the little basketballs in her pupils! Unfortunately I have a well trained pair of eyes and she exhibits some mild eyeball-wonk, which can be seen in her front-facing image above.
Accessories:- Her jewellery consists of a mismatched pair white stud earrings with a chain-link, and a tiny twisted dark purple choker with a straight white smooth middle piece. Her unique hair accessory is one of those beaded, bobble hair ties that, if you're a 90's kid, your mother probably fractured your skull with, in several places, putting one of these bad boys in your hair (I'm kidding lmao). The two bobbles are pink; solid colour with an almost netball-like embossed pattern, and purple; semi-translucent, embossed with stars and lightning bolts and is fixed to the white elastic. Her dress is an oversized sports tee with matching pink and purple stripes on the sleeves and around the bottom. In the centre is a purple to blue gradient of the number '98' and below is 'GRL PWR' in pink. Her shoes are mid-top white sneakers with criss-crossed laces, and intricate sewing and sole detail with a forward and backward "F" near the inner heel. Her hair elastics are hot pink.
Styling:- While styling Dance's hair, one entire plug of her rooting came out, showing to me that the hair was indeed pre-braided before rooting. I gave a solid tug on the rest of her hair and I am happy to report that no others came out. It was pretty mangled, so I'm glad it came out and that I didn't have to forcibly remove it myself. She's got a couple pulled hairs in the braids at the front of her head and is quite obvious when her hair is put up into her high pony, which is kind of unfortunate, but these imperfections are pretty common in dolls with braided hair so I'll let it slide. I added a little bit of extra style to my Dance and kept half of her pink streaks out of her high pony, along with a couple strands of her base brown as well for contrast, so she's got looooong bangs. I tied her hair back with one of the supplied hair elastics which are incredibly stiff and don't have much give but work surprisingly well. I then added her bobble hair tie to cover it up and voila, done! To keep her fancy bangs down, I admit I did need to use some hairspray and to position them correctly.
@KAWAII.QTEE
Next is Kawaii, while undeniably the cutest and most brightly coloured of them all, out of the three I have is the most difficult to 'correctly' style. Kawaii has a pale skin complexion with a slight yellow-tinge and has lavender colour hair.
Variant:- Again I got the standard Day variant, but I love it as much as the other variants.
Fail Look:- In Kawaii's fail look, she wears a light pink dressing gown, has a pastel yellow face mask, and smeared makeup across her smirking faceplate. Blue eyeshadow is smudged around her eyes, in addition to rubbed yellow, purple, and orange on her cheeks and hot pink on her lips. Her hair is grouped in 5 sections and wriggle each which-way like stringy purple worms frozen in place.
Fix Look:- In her gorgeous bright purple eyes she has a design in her pupils; a star! She has blue upper-lid eye shadow and yellow bottom-lid eyeshadow with little pastel pink and purple stars and hearts on her cheeks. She has two-tone pinky-peach lipstick, dark on the top lip, and light on the bottom. Her lips are shaped like a small kissy pout. She does have a very VERY minor eye wonk, but its certainly not as noticable as Dance's.
Accessories:- Kawaii's accessories are a pair of semi-translucent yellow drop earrings in a heart-pearl-star-pearl-heart order, a matching pearl necklace of the same colour with stars and a bow. Her unique accessories are three hair clips - pink heart, blue bow, yellow star - and two large purple clip-on flocked pompoms. The box art shows the heart, bow, and star to be different colours to what I received, so I suppose there is accessory variation there. Her dress is a long sleeved primarily jumper/sweatshirt piece with a faux pastel yellow tshirt collar underneath. A white charicature of a little girl with a icecream in her hand and long purple hair occupies a majority of space on the front of the dress, and a bunch of pastel shapes and designs cover the back. Dripping down upon it is a pink goo design that stops at the chest and about a third of the way down the sleeves, where it changes to white and back to pink for the wrist cuffs. Kawaii's shoes are primarily blue hightops with white sole and toe. They're detailed with seam lines, zippers with star zip tags, laces and a pink bow on the right shoe just below the tongue. The soles of the shoes are quite simple, with horizontal grip lines a star under the heel, and the forward and reverse "F" on the insole. Her hair elastics are pale pink.
Styling:- Once styled out, her hair is very soft and pliable. It's not as soft as DJ's but still very soft. It was easy to separate specific areas to get the 'correct' style that would hold her pompoms properly but less so to tie the desired areas in place with the supplied elastics. I had to use my own elastics and hairspray to get the hair to stay in place before finishing up with one of the supplied elastics and adding the hairclips.
@SLAYITDJ
Finally DJ, the pleasant surprise and my personal favourite of these three. Her skin is a lovely subtle porcelain shade and her hair is light blonde.
Variant:- Regarding the pleasant surprise, DJ is the Evening variant! I haven't seen many of the evening variants but I must say this one takes the cake for the best one.
Fail Look:- DJ's fail look features a plastic teal dressing gown, purple mask, and a face-plate with a whole lot of purple and yellow makeup. Her hair is fairly similarly 'sculpted' to Kawaii's with 5 sectioned chunks of hair bent and curled randomly.
Fix Look:- This is where this look really stands out from the basic day variant. Her makeup - oh my god. Above her eyebrows are 3 pastel stars of blue and yellow and a single trail of pink. Her eyeshadow on both eyes is a pink, purple, blue, and yellow gradient that goes all the way up to her eyebrows, but on the right eye, there's a very David-Bowie-esque pointed geometrical shape that stretches from the top of her eyebrow to the bottom of her cheek in similar colours to the eyeshadow itself. Glitter coats the top of her eyelids but it's very messy, there's some on her eyebrow for grief's sake, and I'll need to carefully remove a few specks. Bellow the eyes are little pink-yellow gradient lightning bolts, 4 silver stars, silver speckling, and brown rouging. Out of nowhere is her elliptical smirking lips wearing a very bold opalescent purple lipstick. Her eyes are a fantastic bright green, but unfortunately, she has some mild eye wonk not visible in the photo and I cannot for the life of me make out what the image in her pupils is meant to be.
Accessories:- All her jewelry is of the same silver embedded grey plastic. Her earrings are mismatched; the right is an incomplete hoop stud, and the left is a stud with a very long chain-link that 'clips' to the top of her ear. The necklace is a thick gridded choker with a long rope chain that connects at an intersect and merges into one long piece. DJ's semi-translucent hot pink high boots with black accents give me such Draculaura vibes. The black detailing of the top and laces are quite poorly done though, so that is also something I'll need to fix. Her dress is a shiny, geometric shape-covered long-sleeved tube dress, with the colours pink, purple, blue and green, and hot pink glittery shoulder pads and belt built into the dress. Because of whatever stiff fabric the dress is made of, DJ cannot put her arms as far down by her sides as the other dolls can. DJ's unique accessory is a faux mohawk clip... not much to say there lmao.
Styling:- The look is a lot harder to create to look nice than you might think. DJ has a side part, the look says for you to pull her hair to the top to put the clip in, but... but her part though. It'll merge with the other side and become unthatched and thatching is the worst to do by hand. So I didn't do that. I tried experimenting with the hair itself to try and use her actual hair to hold itself into a mohawk but there were bald patches where I couldn't hide them so that was a bust. Then I decided "this is her evening look, why can't her hair just stay down?". And so it did. The mild styling of her hair didn't change the condition of her super soft nylon locks so I think it's fair to say these dolls will survive child's play too.
General Observations and stuff:
Each of the dolls stands between 9-10", or somewhere around 24cm, which is on the short side for most dolls in stores right now. That's right, not only are they racially diverse, they're not all the same height; pretty cool huh?
Looking at them separately you can barely tell but when you put them side by side you start noticing. Dance is the tallest of the three and Kawaii is the shortest.
I'd done some reading prior to getting these for myself and it appears they also have 3 different body shapes as well, but I managed to pick up the three that's the same so I can't show that comparison.
All dolls have 11 points of articulation; neck, shoulder, elbow, wrist, hip, and knees, allowing for more diverse poses and movement than say... most Barbies. >-> The hands don't quite reach the face, but they do come off which makes clothing the dolls sooo much easier. If you noticed the weird stand base shape, I'm certain its because they slot together for a more compact display! Very cool.
Each doll does come with a 'fix guide' but they're barely helpful and you're left trying to figure out how Kawaii's pompoms are meant to stay clasped to her straight hair without sliding off from their weight, for example. I used the box art to mock up something that looked like she should. Dance's was pretty simple but with her center part, it made it quite the task to pull it all back without undoing the thatching but it's less of a problem for her with her thick microbraids. Fixing the thatching would be easy pee-zee. As you know I gave up on DJ's style, not wanting to completely ruin the thatching of her off-center part.
Thoughts and Onions (not a typo):
I feel like Dance, as a dark-skinned doll, has been done quite tastefully. With the sensitive topic of whitewashing dolls and characters these days, it's nice to see such a gorgeous and well-executed representation of the dark population and is why I expect this doll to disappear quicker than the others. I'm sure kids of that demographic will love that they are included and will love their mini-me even more.
Kawaii can fit into so many aesthetics like candy, pastel, Lolita, K-pop, J-pop, and is very eyecatching. She radiates cuteness and for sure will be one of the most popular of the series. Someone who might not even be a doll collector but is into those aesthetics may be interested in purchasing this doll.
In the variant I have, DJ gives of real night-life rave vibes because everything about her look is just so much extra, particularly her makeup. I mean, her name is literally SlayItDJ so one can only assume she's rocking out with that demographic. *reads the back of the box* Okay she's literally a DJ that... that should have been obvious to me, I don't know why I didn't connect the dots there xD
I would suggest if a younger child were to be given someone from this doll line I would highly recommend Dance or Dj specifically as a starter before upping the difficulty to another doll in the line. I think Loves Glam and Preppi Posh are also potential starters too but don't take my word for it, I don't have them yet to give an official verdict.
Important post-review hacks:
If you want to keep the box of your doll, I've found that the easiest way to open up the back is to poke around with a thin ruler to find the thinnest area of glue, and then slide the ruler in and around like a saw to separate the doll backing from the back card. It's one whole piece, folded at the bottom, so go for the sides and top. Underneath the back card you'll find a mess of sticky tape and plastic tabs which you'll need to remove; pull up and away for the doll backing and doll to be freed. I almost exclusively used an exacto-knife/craft blade/baby Stanley blade to cut around the sticky taped tabs holding the doll in. If you don't want to keep the box or the packaging contents though, just rip it to shreds and cut those tabs lmao.
I did not use the supplied brush, or any other brush for that matter, to struggle through the gelled hair, and I don't even want to try. I've experienced my fair share of stiff doll hair, and brushing it out when its that stiff leaves the hair feeling crusty and sticky, and can actually cause some damage to the hair fibers. I just dunked them all straight in a bowl of hot water with a little bit of dish liquid for about an hour. Works like a charm.
If you intend on buying more than one of the same dolls in person but want the best chance to not pick up a whole duplicate, take a bright pocket torch with you. Shine the torch all around the exposed side, angle it a whole bunch, press against the back, and peer in with one eye. You're gonna look a little weird, but it sure beats spending up to an extra $35 for a whole identical duplicate of the same doll. I didn't do this when I picked up mine because I didn't have any yet, but when I brought them home this is what I did to post my on my Instagram story as predictions, which were indeed correct! The most noticeable giveaway of a day Dance is the white dress, of a day Kawaii is the pink and blue print on the side of her dress, and of evening DJ is the shiny dress and glittery belt.
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These dolls are fun, gorgeous, and are excellent value for money; they're articulated, their hair is excellent, and they have a suitable amount of accessories plus a stand! I am pretty keen on seeing the traits of the other variants in person someday, such as Kawaii's Evening outfit and even DJ's normal outfit but I still very much admire the ones I have. I intend on picking up the remaining 3 in the near future, and perhaps additional variants as these are my favourite doll line right now. I probably won't be trying to make a 'complete set' of variants, being 19/20 'different' dolls. At the current cheapest prices, that'd be $589. Oh my, there's not a chance in hell I'll be doing that.
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Whose Fail will you Fix?
Don't take my words as an unbiased judge for this product. I'm very picky. Do some more research! Check out others reviews, check out their homepage below, or purchase one to discover it for yourself!
Moose Toys #FailFix Brand page
If you have any questions or additional information about this product, please comment!
Thanks for reading, stay tuned for more! <3
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