Can You Dye Doll Hair?

I admit it, the Christmas Crazies have alright hit me.  I’m trying to make sure I have all the “special” gifts taken care of for the kiddos and one of JavaGirl’s special gifts this year includes a Fisher Price Loving Family dollhouse (thank goodness she is too young to read this blog) and that means that she needs the people to go with it.  She believes that all little girls with pigtails are HER — even though she will rarely actually let me PUT her hair into pigtails – so when I saw this daughter doll, I really wanted to get it for her.  However, JavaGirl is a brown-eyed brunette, and apparently in Fisher Price Land, no such girl exists.  Also, much to my chagrin, the big brother doll is a brunette, and JavaGirl’s brother — JavaBoy — is actually a blue-eyed blond.

Now let me explain — I myself am a brown-eyed girl who grew up with weird streaky hair that was light brown with lots of blonde streaks.  I had a blonde mother and a blonde sister (with blue and green eyes respectively) and had zillions of blonde Barbie dolls.  I never did find a doll that looked like me (although oddly enough, my nickname in high school was “Barbie Doll” which I think had to do more with my, um, development than hair color).  Granted, this was not nearly the doll-identity-crisis that girls of other ethnicities face, but it did bother me.   The funny twist of fate on that was that when JavaDad and I got married, I had a hard time finding a cake topper (I wanted the traditional bride and groom type of topper) because by then I had gone to full blonde and JavaDad is dark-haired and apparently the wedding cake topper people think blondes only marry blonds and brunettes marry brunets.  You do not even want to KNOW how many cake toppers I looked at and even bought on eBay until I found just the right one.  (And yes, I did consider painting the heads of some of them to be the right color combination.) 

But I digress…

So tonight, I’m standing there in Wal-Mart, looking at the pig-tailed blonde, wondering if there’s a way to darken her glistening synthetic hair to a light brown closer to JavaGirl’s pretty hair color.  I’m sure there’s no miniature hair salon to send her to.  Real hair dye would probably just slide off and be messy.  I briefly considered painstakingly coloring each strand with a Sharpie marker.  Then I realized how insane that sounded (which naturally made me realize it would be a terrific post). But still… I’ll just float that idea out there in case you have any tips…

I can feel my mother and mother-in-law teasing me from the other side of the screen right about now, so I’d just like to point out that GRANDMA doll has SILVER hair (which they do not)… let’s just see what they think of THAT!  (It looks much grayer in person than in the picture.) 

And don’t even get me started on their sense of fashion.  I’ll save that for another day!

Pictures from Toys R Us website of the Fisher Price Loving Family Figures.

Tagged as: Christmas, dolls, Kids