This is Poppy Rowan. Winter Break Poppy Rowan, to be exact. I bought her nude off of eBay with the intention of customizing her to look like me. I have red hair, and I’m partial to red-headed fashion dolls because most of the fashion dolls of my childhood didn’t have red hair, so as an adult I’m trying to compensate for the lack of red-headed dolls when I was young. Since I started collecting Rainbow High dolls last month, I’ve seen doll collectors on YouTube who customized Rainbow High dolls to look like them. Since Rainbow High dolls have the vivid hair colors of the rainbow rather than natural hair colors, these doll customizers used two methods to change their dolls’ hair colors: dyeing, or re-rooting. I don’t have the experience or patience to re-root, so dyeing it is!
Christmas sweater by Mags Rocking Style on Etsy.
I chose Poppy for my mini-me because she has auburn eyebrows, freckles, and blue eyes – a perfect base for my Mini-Me.
Here she is from the back. Her hair is styled in two long sausage-curl pigtails, and, like all Rainbow High dolls, she has a lot of glue in her hair to keep the curls in place. So I rinsed her hair with hot water until the glue dissolved. You can use shampoo, but you don’t need to. Then I combed out all the tangles with a hairdresser’s fine-toothed rat-tail comb.
STEP ONE: COLOR
My goal for Poppy was to turn her bright orange tresses into a natural-looking auburn color. I watched a few videos on YouTube to learn how to color Rainbow High doll hair, and also to get an idea of which colors of dye I needed. I found a series of videos by Darling’s Dollhouse that I found extremely helpful for technique and color. Then I went to my nearest Michaels craft store to buy everything I needed. I bought Rit All-Purpose Dye in the colors Tan, to neutralize the orange, and Scarlet, to add red to Poppy’s hair. I also bought wooden dowels and a plastic organizer to use as a tub.
I filled the plastic organizer with hot tap water. I added the Tan Rit Dye to the water and swirled the dye with a wooden dowel. The Tan is light enough in color to change the bright orange hair without making it too dark. Then I swirled Poppy’s hair in the colored water for about two minutes. It didn’t look like her hair was taking any of the color, so I added more dye, a little at a time and then swirled the doll’s hair some more until her hair started taking the color. I eyeballed it, taking Poppy out of the water and putting her back in until I liked how it looked. I stopped when her hair looked like a strawberry-blonde/ light auburn. This is her hair while still wet. She looks like Lindsay Lohan.
I immediately rinsed the excess dye from Poppy’s hair with cold water and let her hair dry for a couple of hours before deciding whether to do a second dye job with the Scarlet dye. Her hair color looked a little lighter after drying so I did go ahead and color her hair with the Scarlet over the Tan. Unlike the Tan dye, the Scarlet dye took to the hair immediately so it was a very quick dip. Then I did another dip with Tan to tone down the fiery copper a little. Here is the finished result:
I thought it would be fun to give Poppy a tattoo, like me, so I used a leftover tattoo from the Monster High Create-a-Monster Design Lab.
STEP TWO: BANGS
I wanted my Rainbow High mini-me to have bangs like me, but Poppy doesn’t have bangs. YouTube to the rescue again. This tutorial by Quinsdolls was just what I needed. The one thing I did differently was, after brushing the hair down in front of her face to make the bangs and securing it with a rubber band, I took the hair from the back out from under the rubber band so there wouldn’t be a line across her hair from the rubber band after the hair was boil-permed. The one problem with Winter Break Poppy is that her hair was rooted for pigtails. It was full when parted in the center from the back of the head, but when I combed hair down in front of her face for bangs, it exposed the patchy rooting on the top of her head. I saved the hair that I cut off when I made the bangs, in case I feel ambitious later and decide to re-root the patchy spots, but for now I’ll stop here.
The finished result: kinda punky, kinda funky.
Sweater and leggings by Mags Rocking Style on Etsy. Shoes from the Rainbow High Mini Accessories Studio.
Dollsville, USA 