I love Barbie dolls, I feel like we all know that, right? My favorite doll in the world is completely customized. I had a point in my childhood where I got really into creating my own unique Barbies. I made them clothes and completely altered the way they looked (the very early stage of this is when I colored my Barbie’s face with a black sharpie because I wanted her to be darker like me, lol anyways.) On a tamer side, I learned that you could switch the bodies of the Barbie dolls, all you had to do was pop the head off and stick it on the body of a different doll. I also learned how to reroot doll hair using yarn; When this was done, it looked like the doll had box braids or locs. This was a bit before they started making more diverse dolls, like the fashion lines they have out now, which have much better quality protective style looks.
Once I had experimented enough with Barbie alteration, I decided to try to make my own custom Barbie, for real this time. I was gifted Barbie fashionista doll #32 from my great-aunt, and then for Christmas my mom bought me a Black Barbie Made to Move doll. Those are the ones that have the most joint mobility—-they can move their wrists, their ankles, their knees, and their hips. I swapped the heads of the dolls because the Fashionista doll had a pretty face mold, but didn’t have moveable joints. The Made to Move doll had moveable joints, but a forgettable face.
After swapping the heads, I wanted to try something else on this little Barbie experiment of mine. So, I cut off all of her hair. Her hair was almond brown with honey blond streaks in it. I cut the hair as low as I could and plucked all of the remaining hair and glue from the plugs. I looked in our closet and asked my mom if I could use her brown yarn from Michaels for my experiment, she let me. I spent the rest of my day held up in my room, at my desk, rooting the yarn into the doll’s head with a needle.
My thumb was so sore from pushing the needle through without a thimble. It took a few hours, but by the end the yarn had turned into beautiful brown locs. I had my own Barbie doll that no one else in the world had. She had deep dark skin that was a warm shade of brown, light brown eyes, and red lipstick. I named her Iris.
I played with Iris from when she was a sophomore in high school until she turned 30 (Tons of time jumps took place, but she lived a full and exciting life). Iris in her later life, worked at a magazine company as a fashion columnist, she was such a good dresser. (This was very much inspired by Khadijah James and Carrie Bradshaw, and every other female main character who was a writer because I was their target demographic I fear). Iris is a Cancer-Leo cusp, her birthday is July 23rd. Hopefully that tells the astrology girlies a little bit about her personality.
The thick, gorgeous, long brown locs are really what made Iris all that she was. Sometimes I would hold Iris in my hands and just stare at her. This little mold of plastic contained so much energy and value to me. This little mold of plastic represented all the things that I wanted to be—beautiful to everyone, confident, brave, badass, intimidating, and just all around cool. Iris wasn’t all perfect though, she was impulsive, dramatic when it came to her emotions, and sometimes a little aloof. (Hmm…)
I know now that most people play with dolls, or even sims, as a self-insert, but at the time I didn’t realize I was playing with her in a way that really represented my ideal self. I thought I had just made up a really cool character.
This part of the post is gonna sound weird, but stick with me. I was taking pictures on my laptop in a really nice outfit (I looked really good!). I’m in a time in my life when I’m really trying to get out of my comfort zone when it comes to how I express myself. Not too much on that right now though because I can’t write about it without cringing. Anyways, I have brown locs right now, which resemble the locs Iris has. When I played with her, I liked to just throw her hair around and have the locs look super messy, but also still really cute. That’s kinda what I was doing with my hair in the pictures. When I was looking back at the pictures I took, I saw that I really looked like my doll Iris. Like, that was definitely an outfit I’ve had her wear one time. When I played with Iris I would just dress her up and then pose her and pretend like she was a model at a photoshoot. It weirdly felt like I looked like the pictures I had snapped in my head when I was imagining Iris’ photoshoot.
This is just a really long winded way to say that I saw Iris in myself. Or myself in Iris? Weirdly enough that’s when it all clicked for me that Iris is me and I am her. She just represents the parts of myself that I haven’t tapped into yet.
My favorite doll in the whole wide world, and I have had many, is Iris. She is the culmination of everything I have ever wanted to be (especially the fact that she’s a good dancer, god I wish I knew how to dance!!) Iris was the best gift that I have ever received and funny enough that she was given to me by the two people who know me the best. They are the ones who are most familiar with my tiniest self, and because of that they know best the potential that I have to be the person that I want to be. (They are also the people who bought all my dolls and fed my collection lmao.)
A lot of things that I wanted to be maybe a year or two or even all the way back to my tweens, I am now and that feels so fulfilling. Mostly because I thought it would take drastic change or concentrated attention to get me to be those things, when really they kinda just happened without me even realizing. Like yes of course I did things to get to the person that I wanted to be, but I was kinda gonna do those things anyways? Which means that I will become the person that this present version of myself wants me to be, it's just gonna take some time. It’s really calming because I have always been in a state of looking at what I can change about myself to be better, but reassures that all I need to do is continue being myself because it’s working (and I’m good at it!).
Picture of Iris:
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