I saw an Insta post talking about Aleppo soap working well, @dollsahoy said Aleppo soap is olive oil and lye, I have a bin of glue heads just for experimenting with, and tried straight olive oil followed by dish soap.
This Barbies hair wasn’t super gluey but it was clumpy.
Now it’s not.
Olive oil did dissolve the glue.
However, it doesn’t treat the glue inside her head AND the soapy wash afterward didn’t get all of the oil out even after 3 washes. I do have hard water.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Got a second parcel from @musicalmeowsandcandiedlemons, i’d completely forgotten even though she’d told me because my brain is currently a sieve (i have multiple to do lists for the basics like “feed yourself” at the moment). So that was a wonderful surprise!
My cam battery decided to tap out after 1 photo so it’s going to be phone cam mostly. Click to continue because I decided to document the process = long post
The parcel contained 6 Mattel glue heads, 4 normal heads, 1 small bust body, 1 Fairytopia Lumina body and some ramie hair.
I decided to start with the non glue heads:
Internal monologue was like: ooh I wonder who she is, she’s gorgeous but wow that nylon has felted bad. who would do this?
neck damage... oh! I know exactly who did you dirty: disney with their stay in the box, don’t brush ‘tude and THAT anvil neck anchor where the top part is somehow made from the hardest plastic known to man.
So post hair removal, I remove some staining with alcohol and do my injection while I’m at it, then acetone, then benzoyl peroxide and two days on the sunlit balcony for this gal.Then a boil and we’ll choose new hair or a wig.
Kitty! With a cool spot pattern and dip dyed hair of some kind.
Now you might think that looks like whiteboard felt tip, go with alcohol! but I took a photo to show why that’s a bad idea: alcohol smears felt tip so go with acetone or vaseline and soap or something like the WD40 stain remover pen. Kitty has pink ink stains to her lip and cheek so it was ok to remove the blush so I used acetone. She’s soaking right now just in case the hair dye was done with acrylic. She’ll get acne cream later.
Snapstar Lola. Let’s disregard the 80s blue eyeshadow and white based blush, her makeup is uneven: the lips are to the side slightly but the lower eyeliner/lashes are totally different sizes. top liner is uneven too. The eyes are half round hollow 10mm like LIV but unlike LIV they are lined with a very thin layer of white paint which scratches just from pushing behind the eyewells. Easily remedied with some acrylic paint but an odd thing. Same with the neck-hole which extends deep up to her nose.
I removed the lower eye makeup, added a brown and red pastel blush to even things out a little. Note: the eyewells tear very easily even with undersized eyes. Snapstars are just not my jam.
Wildhearts Jacy has thickly and beautifully rooted nylon hair but the neck and eye design baffles me. I gave her a quick cupids bow and reset her hair. I’m thinking her sclera need that pink over painting, I can felt-tip the eyes brown or dark green and add some blush then see where to go from there.
I prepped four glue heads to go in the ethoxylated alcohol solution, by brushing the two i could, detinselling Cleo and putting them all in tight buns. I used monkey sized orthodontic elastics that will withstand the solution without melting or snapping. I need to find the right containers tomorrow. Probably clear plastic cups.
Summer is from the fashionistas era, they went from nice earth tones in the Cali girl era to Raquelle who’s blue eyes went well with her jet black hair to uncanny looking pale eyes with heavy eyemakeup that somehow looked off. I wasn’t able to save her. She’d need new eyes and a new frontline.
Rochelle’s adorable as always, if a little glue stained around the edges. Boil, superglue and a side part if she gets a reroot for sure.
Protip: after removing icky sticky glue, rub petroleum jelly on the doll and put some inside the neck to swish around during a wash. Petroleum jelly on a paper towel or a rag will clean up your instruments good as new.
Lumina’s body is going to be perfect for PJ! It has a yellow stain to her hand which I’m not going to try and bleach, yellow takes forever or doesn’t budge at all. The legs were coated in green so I gave them an acetone wipe (you can see the difference in the first photo) then I sliced down the neck by a couple of mm, slightly more at the front, added a touch of glue to stabilise the anchor then wrapped it in teflon tape to avoid neck melt. it’s drying right now so photos later this week.
Finally here’s rebodied Janay Blue (from the body in the first parcel) looking radiant dressed as a spring princess.
Today I did more than cutting my Figuarts - I also cleaned doll hair!
I’ve been fighting with my second Draculaura, whose hair was becoming stickier by the minute. With every product I tried, it became more and more like Rochelle’s. It started to look like she was going to go to the reroot pile and rot there, because I have rerooted exactly 4 plugs ever and that was months ago. I’ll finish that pile, but who knows when...
Then I ran into this forum entry, and inspired by user seansdoll’s tip, I soaked her hair in rubbing alcohol and rinsed it, then left to dry (and I did the same with Rochelle because why the hell not).
It looked wet hours after, so I brushed it and...
Wow.
So soft.
No grease. No stickiness. Nothing.
Just soft, smooth, flowy hair.
I wonder how long it will last (they are both glueheads, no remedy will be 100% final and definitive), but wow. Give it a try. It wastes a lot of alcohol, but they feel better than new.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
What's funny is it smells EXACTLY like L.A.'s Totally Awesome.
My first attempt at using CIF cream to get rid of Mattel's head glue was on a Summer who's hair was CAKED in glue all the way to the tips.
Those lines on her face were me trying out a new 00000 paintbrush.
CIF didn't work. At least, it didn't work as fast and easy as it seemed to work for people on Instagram.
She's on her sixth shampooing or so and I accidentally let the cleanser sit for a few days and she's still gluey.
I just tried CIF on a Barbie who's hair wasn't as bad.
She only had about a half-inch of glue soaking.
CIF seems to have worked better on her hair, though I won't know if it's clean until after she's had time to dry.
Regardless, neither of these dolls had the glue inside their heads treated with this method so it's taking just as much time as and is less effective than a regular T.A. soaking would have been for Summer.
Whether or not their hair is clean after this, they still have glue inside their heads that will continue to leech out over time and will have to be re-treated repeatedly unless they get a good whole-head treatment to dissolve the glue inside their heads as well.
I got an ask about commissioning me to deglue some doll heads and I don't do that for people.
It's a pain in the butt and I don't want to.
And, while I will say "I figured out the solution to Mattel's head glue", it was truly a collaborative effort.
@dolldirt mentioned using a floor cleaner and it worked, but he's not in the US and that floor cleaner didn't exist, here.
I decided screw it, I'll try this multi-purpose cleanser I COULD get called L.A.'s Totally Awesome and it worked (no others did)! So that's what I've been recommending to people, though it's a long, slow process and not very fun.
@firespirited did some research on the ingredients in the floor cleaner and Totally Awesome, found they both share ethoxylated alcohol (at least, I think that's what it was), did more research and found the same ingredient in CIF Cream cleanser (sometimes JIF, depending on region), but CIF also wasn't available in the states so I kept recommending Totally Awesome.
Scrub Daddy acquired CIF not too long ago, and now CIF is available here.
Where Totally Awesome can take a few days of soaking to get rid of the glue, CIF works really fast when applied like shampoo. However, that does only clean the hair on the outside of the head and not the glue inside the head whereas soaking in Totally Awesome will get the glue inside the head, too, so it would need to be redone now and then.
Regardless, it's great to have another option that works to remove the glue instead of just covering it up and hopefully it'll become even more readily available over time.
