I recently posted that I found this bald head on Ali and was planning to root her (add hair).

Today the head arrived! Here are a few close-ups in better quality. I always reduce the image sizes to avoid taking up too much space on the Lemmy instance (who needs photos of a doll head in 4k?), but it's still much better than what you can find in the store:

I can also confirm that it's indeed an original head. In the last photo, you can see the Mattel stamp. It says 2011, but it's not the manufacturing year - it's the year when this face was first introduced. As I mentioned earlier, it's the Mermaid sculpt. My wife has a doll with this face, and you can see the same year on the back:

I wonder how these Chinese sellers got their hands on it 🤔

I also ordered a Chinese green body called MengF. Unfortunately, in green the only available option is their old 2020 version with 12 joints. I think the green body wasn't very popular, so they stopped manufacturing it 😅 Color-wise, it's a good match. You can see the difference between the body and the head in the photo, but in reality it's fine.

For some reason, her hands look a bit different in this lighting. In reality, the color difference is barely noticeable.

For the hair, I ended up choosing black saran:

The plan is to try rooting this Karla head first for practice, and after that root the green Mermaid head:

I'll post the results, along with photos of the process 🙂