A not-so-brief look at Wild Hair Sindy

RagingMoon1987 again, and it's day five of my Facebook ban.  Only two more days to go, Moon Girl!  You can do it, you can do it!  LOL, it's also been a long, hot, humid summer, not as bad as summers before, but bad enough that I've been uncomfortable.  I tend to get dizzy and nauseous when I'm too hot for too long, and my AC never got repaired so the only respite I've had from the heat is at work, where the library's AC is alive and well (thank God).  I usually do most of my work for these posts during weekends, but with my brain having been about the consistency of half-set Jell-O I've wanted to do nothing but take cold showers, make sure the animals are alright, and binge-watch Boohbah on YouTube (that's one tripped-out program, y'all).  Now watch, after I've complained all summer about the heat, as soon as it gets cold I'll harp about that because I'm impossible to please!!!  One annoying summer is not enough to kill my lifelong hatred of winter, no matter how unwell excessive heat makes me feel.  I've been wondering if the bugs haven't agreed about the humidity, as I'm only now seeing cicada husks.  I usually start seeing these earlier in the month, and so far, this one is the only one I've seen.

I used to collect these husks, believe it or not.  I called 'em shellbugs and I'd fill whole coffee cans with them, much to my parents' chagrin.  Won't be much longer 'til I start seeing woolly worms!

Now...after multiple delays today's doll is finally getting her moment in the sun.  This post was inspired by one done by Purple Monkfish back in February, in which she discusses some of her Sindy dolls.  Monkfish is British, and thus good ol' Sindy is a smidge easier to find for her than it is for me.  That plus she's been actively collecting Sindy for quite some time and I...haven't.  Anywho, I reviewed my own little Sindy...oh gosh, when was that???  <pauses to look>  Lordy, it's been two years since I reviewed my Sindy doll, AND I never updated the admittedly sucky pictures!  Today's Sindy is quite different from the Pedigree and Marx Sindy dolls that I'm more familiar with, at least in overall appearance.  She's yet another Hasbro doll, just like Jem and Maxie and Whimzee and Aster and God knows who else, and she's from the Wild Hair line.  Here she is in her box.

I was hoping I could find a brunette like Monkfish's Wild Hair doll, but alas, there were none to be found.  Indeed, the blondes aren't the easiest to find either, not at a price I could handle, leastways.  I obviously DID find an affordable one, but it was no easy feat!  Anywho, the back of the box shows off a full picture of the doll and the various combinations that her hair extensions can be worn in.

Since I always point out store stickers on packages, check out THIS relic!

I've never once seen a Zellers IRL, partially because they were a Canadian entity and I've never been to Canada.  I thought Sindy was exclusively a British doll during her Hasbro days, but maybe I'm just full of malarkey.  Maybe Zellers wasn't exclusively a Canadian entity after all, or maybe Sindy was available in Canada during her time spent with Hasbro?  I dunno.  Anyway, I call attention to this sticker because Zellers went the way of Kmart back in 2013.  As far as I know there are no more, though some internet sources might tell y'all that the chain is on its way back.  Back in 2016 there were all of two Zellers stores open in the whole country, and I have no idea if either of those still exist now. 

Now that that's out of the way, here's Sindy out of her box.  Doesn't look like Marx Sindy, does she?  She looks a lot like BARBIE!!!

Indeed, Mattel did slap Hasbro with a lawsuit over this new Sindy face, and they WON!!!  Normally I'd have been rooting for Hasbro since Mattel has a track record of getting butt-hurt about shenanigans pulled by other toy companies, but in this case I can see their point.  Some of the Hasbro-era dolls also have what Monkfish likes to call a "pig face," with a nose that turns up a little too much, but my Sindy appears to have dodged that bullet (I quite like my doll's face, in fact).  She didn't dodge this though, the plastic strip that got sewn into the hair.

Oh puke, I positively HATE this way of securing hair!  Thankfully this method of securing hair is growing more and more endangered; indeed I can't remember the last time I bought a modern doll with their hair sewn into one of those hateful strips.  Luckily for me this one came out without much fuss, but this is still a horrid way to secure doll hair and I'm glad it hasn't made too many appearances lately.  There was also a massively tangled hank of hair in that mix, and I had to cut that out.  I failed to photograph that, but it looked like it got caught in some bit of machinery and twisted until it couldn't untwist.

As y'all might be able to tell, Wild Hair Sindy is all about hair, and indeed that was another incentive for me to get her.  It's been years since I had my own hair dyed, and I NEVER got to dye it blue like I wanted to, so I live out my fantasies through my dolls.  Wild Hair Sindy fits the "wild" bill pretty well, though no one could tell it at first glance.  Her base hair is your typical crimped platinum blonde saran, not terribly unlike her Hasbro sister/cousin/friend Maxie's hair, or like Butterfly Art Barbie's hair, but she also has THESE!!!

Heckyeah, extensions!  Two hot pink, one purple, and one orange, plus a blue clip.  The orange one is very curly, the pink ones are crimped, and the purple one is fairly straight.  The pink and purple extensions have tinsel strands mixed in with the hair.

I...actually have never been a fan of tinsel like this!  My Hula Hair Christie and Teresa have skirts made of this stuff, and I don't have pictures but the tinsel looks a little tortured after twenty-plus years of being combed and manipulated.  Some Monster High dolls are the same way.  Sindy's extensions are in better shape since they've been NRFB all these years, but I'll be treating them with respect anyway so they'll stay halfway decent.

Sometimes the hair extensions that accompany dolls are too long, too short, too thin, or too cumbersome to play with effectively, but Sindy's extensions are a rare item that would please Goldilocks and her "just right" sensibilities.  They're thick enough to look nice when hanging loose, and they're just the right length to not look stupid.

I'm particularly partial to the purple extension, as it's topped with a gold bow.  I'm particularly fond of topping my own ponytail with big goofy-looking bows and thus I like seeing this bow perched in Sindy's hair (I'm thankful to Psycho JoJo Siwa for making hair bows trendy again, by the way).

The orange extension also has a bow, one that I added myself, and to my delight it matches a skirt that Sindy will be modeling later. 

Let's look at the means of attachment briefly.  One of the things that I usually hate about doll hair extensions is that they don't usually attach very well.  They usually attach with combs or clips that want to fall out, but again Sindy avoided this.  See the attachment site???

That, folks, is a plug.  Not a comb, not a clip, not a piddling little loop of plastic like Featherageous Jade's extensions had/have, but a plug that clicks into a hole in the doll's head like the hair on the Cutie Pops.  Indeed, the box called these "'pop-in' ponytails."  I never would've dreamed that I'd see hair plugging into a doll head of this size, but it does.  See the hole?  Sort of reminds me of that huge crater on the Saturnian moon Mimas, for those of y'all that like astronomy.

This method begs a comparison not only to the Cutie Pops, but also to another Hasbro hair-play doll, the long-defunct Aimee, who had hair extensions that plugged into holes in her head.  Aimee's hairpieces did not attach well from what I've been told, but Hasbro apparently learned from their mistakes with her because Sindy's hairpieces stay put.

Two of these ponytails match and two don't, meaning that I can go hog-wild with these!  I can make Sindy look semi-coordinated with the two matching tails...

...or I can use just one on one side or the other...

...OR I can put drastically different tails on each side.

I can even leave the hair unadorned.  As big as those holes are, they're still easily concealed by Sindy's base hair.

As a final outrageous touch I can use the clips on these.  The clips are supposed to attach these extensions to a child's head, but that's a little above my level of silliness so I just clip them to Sindy's hair, when I bother with them at all.

The backside of this clip has a clip of its own for attaching to the hairpiece.

Wild Hair Sindy is a good name for this doll, because one really can go wild with her hair!  

I lied when I said that this is going to be a full-blown review, since there's not a lot to talk about regarding Sindy's face paint or body.  Her body is a lot like a nineties-era Barbie's, with the addition of a little bone structure around the ribcage...

...and her face is free of missing paint.  Some Sindy dolls have baby blue or mint green eyes, but my doll has lilac eyes, plus light brown brows and some decidedly unusual lip paint!

The lilac eyes are unnatural, as only albinos come with this eye color, but as I've said before dolls are not subject to the restrictions of reality.  These eyes do make me giggle though, for a rather unusual reason, one that could only have cropped up (ironically) on a Facebook group.  C'mon, where else do I find inspirations for tangents???  In addition to multiple doll groups I belong to a rather active group of Moody Blues fans, and we like to share articles and photos and videos of the band.  The article in question, a vintage article from the 1970s, stated that lead vocalist Justin Hayward had brown eyes, but all of us (myself included) were bound and determined that he had blue eyes.  It took a rather lengthy discussion to determine...that Justin's eyes are actually VIOLET, a point proven if one looks at a decent picture of Justin, rather than at the blurry music video that I used as my evidence (Justin is the blonde one, for those of y'all unfamiliar with the band).  I stand by my statement that Handsome Hayward's eyes look blue in the video in question, but...well, they are and they're not.  Not the shade of blue that I'm used to, anyway; I have pale blue eyes and thus am used to seeing those on people, famous or no.  Thus seeing Elizabeth Taylor eyes on Justin Hayward threw me for quite the loop!  Anyway, every time I find a doll with violet eyes now I giggle, as it took seventy people a solid week and somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand comments to determine the eye color of one person that we all supposedly know so much about.  Only on Facebook would a group of people do that.  And that, kids, is why I keep running back to Facebook even though they piss me off big time.  Silly, humorous situations like that make the worries and the fights worth it.

Sigh...I apologize for that tangent, kiddies.  I think genetics are interesting, especially when they deal with eye color, and I also love trivia about celebrities, but I'm ready to leave that tangent alone.  I want to look briefly at Sindy's lip paint.  Looks like there's a hair stuck to the paint in there.

Thank God she doesn't have bubblegum lips!  For the most part this paint is okay, but that pale crescent on Sindy's lower lip drives me nuts.  I think it's supposed to represent a layer of gloss, but instead it looks like another row of teeth!  I wish Hasbro had added real gloss instead of that weird tooth-colored crescent.

Dig these earrings!

Fashion dolls of the eighties and nineties had earrings that ran from tame to outrageous, and while Sindy falls on the tamer end of that continuum she still has some neat bangles.  They're big, garish, orange lightning bolts, not terribly unlike the goofy bangles that I sometimes wear.  Seriously, I've got jack o'lanterns, spiders, jellyfish, tornadoes, elephants, shamrocks, Pete the Cat, stuff that one might picture Ms. Frizzle wearing.  The only criteria is that the earrings have to be lightweight; none of that heavy crap for my dainty little lobes, thank you too much!  Anyway, I always get a kick out of doll earrings like the ones Sindy's got.  Goofy earrings occasionally make appearances on Barbie dolls today, but nowhere near as often as they used to!  And as a last little haw-haw, these earrings can be removed.  This is a good thing, as I sometimes have to untangle Sindy's thick hair from these baubles.  Needless to say, removing the earrings makes resolving that problem a lot easier.

Okay, so we've looked briefly at Sindy and her trippy little hair extensions and her trippy eyes and her trippy earrings...let's face it, this is a pretty tripped out doll.  Now what?  Oh right, clothes.  Sindy's clothes are...well, trippy!  In past reviews I've derided eighties and early nineties fashion as repulsive, but I have to admit that some of these styles have grown on me.  Fashion dolls of the era could be colorful and stick to the latest trends, and they managed to do so without being too trashy.  Gaudy, yes, but I'd rather have gaudy than trashy.  That being said, Sindy does show a fair amount of skin.  She's not as scantily clad as some of the Bratz were, but this outfit would never have passed my high school dress codes, or probably y'all's either, for that matter.  I love how unabashedly everything clashes though, and I mean EVERYTHING.  I'm just going to glance over these and look for quality issues.

The vest-top-thingy snaps shut, which I love.  I vastly prefer snaps to Velcro.

The skirt is short and very buoyant, but luckily Sindy has a pair of bright yellow skivvies on underneath.  These are not permanently attached, unlike Maggie's (WANT HER TO BE SMOOF!!!).

When I said above that nothing matches, I meant it.  Sindy's outfit is done in orange, yellow, pink, black, white, and gold, but the shoes are BLUE.

That's pushing this clashing thing just a little.  I love blue and I love blue shoes, but this shade of blue doesn't match anything Sindy has, hair or clothes or eyes or anything...oh wait, there IS the hair clip, but Sindy doesn't wear that.  The shades do match, though.

I love these shoes though, regardless of whether they match or not.  Wish I had a pair in my size!  Again, this brings Pete the Cat to mind, and his white shoes that briefly turned several different colors, including blue.  Can y'all tell that I'm just a little fond of Pete the Cat?  So many children's books push a veiled (or not-so-veiled) political agenda nowadays, so seeing harmless, colorful books like James Dean's work pleases me greatly.  Anyway, Sindy's shoes are vinyl and are quite soft to the touch, with no huge molding gaffes or anything like that.  They've even got little treads, which was fairly commonplace for doll shoes back in the nineties.

And that's it, right?  Well...not quite.  Hasbro released some other hair extensions for tinkering around with, and while I don't have them yet, I do plan on getting them in the future.  They're strange extensions, y'all!  Far stranger than the orange curly fall.  But even without the extra falls I can still have fun with Sindy here, as she is able to wear older Barbie clothes and vice versa.  Here she is with Maggie; Sindy's top is tight on Maggie, but I got it fastened.

To my great surprise some of the more modern Barbie outfits fit too, mostly loose-fitting stuff like the yellow Despicable Me dress (left) and the Supergirl set with the aforementioned striped skirt that matches Sindy's new bow.

I've got a Care Bears dress somewhere too, a loosely cut frock with Grumpy Bear on it.  Sindy could probably wear it too, but it's in storage somewhere, probably mixed in with the things I have reserved for Momoko, who wore the Grumpy Bear dress first and looked darn good in it.  But basically anything modern that's sized for a curvy Barbie is worth a try on a Hasbro Sindy doll.  One thing that Sindy CAN'T manage is Barbie shoes.  She's got unusual feet, rather large but not as large as those of a Monster High doll or Tuesday Taylor.

Now that I think of it, the only thing different about these feet is the shape; Sindy's arches are shaped differently from Midge's.  As a result Sindy can't shove her plates into most of the Barbie shoes I've got, and her blue shoes are roomy on Maggie's dainty little nub-feet.

I'll have to stick to the shoes Sindy's got or find some other outfit for her to wear if I want her to have new shoes.  Luckily the handful of Hasbro Sindy outfits that I saw on eBay have shoes included...unlike most of the clothes that Mattel makes now!!!  Wait a minute...take that back, I did see a fashion pack with ONE pair of shoes.  One pair of shoes for two dresses, but that's still a step in the right direction.  As I've said before, I hate having a fully dressed doll with all the accessories but nothing for her feet.

Ahem...don't get me started on THAT soapbox again!  LOL, this particular Sindy is a fun doll with eye-catching colors and a simple, kid-friendly concept.  I especially love how her hair resists tangling, which I DIDN'T note above.  Since the hair is crimped it resists tangling, and when it does tangle it combs out with relatively little fuss.  Now I will concede that this doll is not the old Pedigree doll that I've been hoping to scrounge up, but she IS Sindy and she's kept me busy for several afternoons so I'm not going to complain.  I'm pleased as punch that she can share some clothes with Barbie, and I'm positive that I can find some other shoes for her somewhere.  If any of y'all are into nineties-era Barbies and Barbie wannabes, or if you don't care what era your Sindy dolls come from, then this particular Sindy should fit in just fine.

I should have one more post up before the week is over; it's an Ideal doll in the Crissy family, so the post should be fairly brief.  But as I said on Saturday, she's worth sharing anyway.

Cordially yours,
RagingMoon1987