#barbiefix

So, this is for those of you who have had a Mattel doll in the last several years that has come down with the dreaded glue hair problem. When your doll’s head is full of hard, sticky glue that seeps out into her hair and makes it all sticky, clumpy and nasty.

Baby powder only works on the ones with light colored hair cos’ it leaves a dusty residue. Ditto for cornstarch. A lot of the suggested cures are toxic, nasty chemicals that can remove the doll’s face paint if you get it too close and they don’t always want to work the first, second or third time out. Even good old trusty Dawn dish soap doesn’t cut this greasy mess. But this does:

Turpenoid, pictured above, is a natural, nontoxic cleaner and conditioner for paint brushes --meant as a solvent for oil based paints!

It’s nowhere near as harsh as degreasers and other cleaning chemicals and it has conditioner meant for synthetic bristles built into the formula. The best part? It won’t take your doll’s face off and the fumes won’t suffocate you!

The cleaning process for doll hair is a two to four step process depending on the amount of glue ick in your doll’s hair.

1. Start by pouring some Turpenoid into a tupperware or other dish of your choice - I used a disposable tupperware- and dip your doll’s hair into it. Work it around with your hands the same as you would to clean a paintbrush and don’t be shy about getting it on the doll’s scalp too, where the glue seeps out from.

2. Now take your doll to the sink -- and make sure you use COLD water only!!! Hot water will only make the glue seepage worse as it softens the glue inside the head! -- Add some Dawn dish soap to her hair and lather it up real good and bubbly before you rinse.

**If your doll’s hair feels odd between your fingers after it’s rinsed, don’t worry, That’s as much from the sticky glue that has come off on your hands as anything. I repeat those two steps a second time for safety, just to be sure the remaining ick feeling IS what’s on my hand and not the doll’s hair.

Final step is to lay your doll out on a towel and let her dry thoroughly! 

Thanks to the brush conditioner in the Turpenoid, your doll’s hair should come out not only clean but soft and smooth as new and easy to brush.

Here’s a Rapunzel doll I did the Turpenoid wash on last night~

Head Off Disaster and the Old, Weird World Wide Web

As I posted, my poor daughter spent all her money on a Fairy Barbie and almost immediately its head came off.  Like any good 21st Century Dad, I turned to the internet for a solution.  Surely this design flaw has been discussed, sussed out and solved already.

But here's a truth about the internet these days:  the most useless people have provided the most useless answers to almost any question.  I don't really understand what the point is of going on Yahoo Answers to post "I don't know."  Or why go to the trouble of creating a Wiki-How page with this 4th Step:  

Find a new hobby. Clearly you are over Barbies if her head keeps coming off, as Barbie heads are not prone to falling off without intervention from human hands.

Perhaps that was a joke, but I was not in a joking mood!  And when you need help on the internet, real help, that's when you hope to find help from the OWWWW.  That's the Old, Weird World Wide Web.

Sadly, a lot of kids these days have never seen the OWWWW, the Internet before the walled gardens of Facebook and its ilk.  They've never wandered through the weird pages of Geocities created by the obsessed nerds who created their own terrible websites.

But that's where I found the help I needed.  I needed help putting a Barbie Head back on, but I also needed to understand the inner functioning of the Barbie Head.  So I was delighted to find "TUTORIAL:  How I Restored a 'Trake' - Babes in Toyland Blog" with its perfect hand-made diagrams and mysterious title.

This site was a motherlode of Barbie Decapitation Information.  Perfect OWWW stuff!

TUTORIAL:  How I Restored a 'Trake' - Babes in Toyland Blog

Saving Barbie's Neck (during Head Removal)