Modern crap, part 1: CookieSwirlC Lotta Looks

Behold, I got my phone to work long enough to get this post up this week!  I got the others that I promised complete too, but I'm just going to string them out over the month of April to make things last.  But before we get going, I've got to let my eccentric personality show through with a little bit of non-dolly blather.  As I've stated in the past I'm a tornado buff, and I also love coincidences.  On March 28th Jonesboro got hit hard (rating was an EF3), and on the same day a place in Iowa called Oelwein got hit too (their storm was rated an EF1).  I wouldn't be noting this, except that both towns got clobbered by violent tornadoes on the same day in 1968 as well.  Eight people died in Oelwein in 1968, and Jonesboro lost a whopping thirty-five people.  No one died in either town this time, but the damage is insane in Jonesboro and both towns are having to deal with sheltering newly homeless citizens during this coronavirus mess.  My prayers are with Jonesboro and Oelwein, and with any other communities that got hit over the weekend.  This has been a rough spring...and it ain't over yet.

Now that that's out of the way, these first four days in April will be quite busy here at the blog, with three modern dolls making their debut here and one old doll being revisited.  I'm willing to bet that quite a few of y'all who blog also like to watch YouTube...okay, I admit that I'm assuming, but I know that I like YouTube.  My favorite toy-related channels are PS Toy Reviews, My Froggy Stuff, and CookieSwirlC.  All of them provide upbeat but honest reviews of blind bag dolls and toys (and higher-end toys in the case of Froggy's Smart Dolls), and all of them provide cheerful conversation to go with the items they're examining.  Froggy is my favorite of the three since she also provides tutorials on how to make doll-sized clothes, furniture, props, and dioramas, but I enjoy the others too.  Recently both Froggy and CookieSwirlC were immortalized in the doll world (Froggy as a Fresh Doll and Cookie as a Barbie), and while I did see Cookie's Barbie set in the stores they were pretty pricey.  So I didn't get Cookie Barbie, but I did find these.

I should probably warn y'all that all this together was pretty pricey.  But...I'm awesome and I deserve it, LOL.  Anywho, these are Mattel like Barbie is, they have the CookieSwirlC label on them, and they're called "Lotta Looks."  They're a little goofy-looking, and their oversized noggins remind me of Blythe dolls, so I grabbed one.  Her name is Candy Cub (apologies for the flash glare on that plastic).

Good Lord, is that the third or fourth doll that I own named Candy???  Seems to be a bit of a popular name for dolls, yes?  Anywho, Candy and her shelfmates Chocolate Chip Chill and Rainbow Sugar Rush revisit a concept that...sadly flopped a few years back, with facial features that can be swapped and switched around.  The back of Candy's box shows some of your options (there are plenty).

There's also a brief glimpse of Chocolate Chip Chill, whose mismatched coloring reminds me of my first Hairdorable, Dee Dee...

...and three outfits, or "Mood Packs" in the shapes of various animals.

There's a rabbit, a cat, and a dog.  Of course I like the cat set the best, but I didn't see that one at Wal-Mart.  I did see the rabbit set, and I picked the dog set, or "S'mores Pup," as they call it.

I like dogs, so I can live with that.  The back of the S'mores Pup set has a rehash of what this line contains.

Lastly I got a blind bag set, which I assume holds more mix-and-match pieces.

I thought the back of the box might give some idea about the contents, but instead it's just another rehash of Candy Cub and Chocolate Chip Chill.

The blind bag pieces are not advertised anywhere on any of these packages, and strangely enough, neither is Rainbow Sugar Rush, the third doll in the series.  That surprised me since Rainbow is a more deluxe set with multiple pieces that neither Candy Cub nor Chocolate Chip Chill have.  All three of these dolls come with a hair extension, for example, but Rainbow's is real hair...or it looks like it is in the Amazon pictures.

Right then, let's get started!  Despite being ensconced in plastic Candy's package was not hard to open.  Just slash some strips of tape and you're in.  Here's what she looks like when free of all that shiny plastic.

Hmmm...she's got a peace sign hand just like my Capsule Chix figure does!  For some reason when I look at Candy in this position I want to start singing "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough," but these eyes don't suggest that kind of vibe.

Yikes, that's more of a "Bully" vibe!  Yeah, I took that from disco to hard rock in a span of about five seconds, LOL.  Anyway, these eyes have little frowny faces painted in the rather ample pupils.  Were it not for those I'd just say that Candy has a resting bitch face like me and let that be that.  Luckily for me (and Candy) those attitude-filled eyes can be switched around...just like another Candi that I own, Cutie Pops Candi.

Yes, Lotta Looks have facial features that pop out and can be swapped around, very much like the Cutie Pops.  In order to do this effectively she should have a few more face pieces, which I believe are concealed in this little box.

The back of Candy's main package reveals what these pieces look like, so why the pieces are concealed in a blind box is beyond me.  But they're all here, which is more than I can say for one of my L.O.L. Surprises.

Uh-oh, those eyes are crying pink goo, and the mouthpiece is clenched teeth.  Doesn't look like Candy is any happier with her new face than she is with her current one.  Indeed, it looks like she's descended from fairly strong irritation to spiraling despair.

As I like to joke on Facebook, paint her blue and she could sing "Ride My See-Saw," she's so moody!  So let's look at Candy a little closer before playing with these pieces.  She's another small doll with a big noggin like Blythe and the Cutie Pops are, but she's shorter than both of them by quite a hair.  I love their differing expressions, by the way!  Neither Candi nor Jaylin are having any of Candy's attitude, but they ignore her in completely different ways.

She's taller than Na! Na! Na! Surprises, Emerald the Enchanting Witch, and Moondreamers, but that doesn't seem to impress Candy much either.  Unlike Candi and Jaylin, Whimzee is a hair afraid of this temperamental new doll, though she need not worry with Emerald on her side.

Her hair is hot pink, is all one piece, and it comes off.

Sort of like Monster High's Create-a-Monster sets.  This...wig?  Hairpiece?  Whatever it is, it has three holes in the top.

The holes are to hold these.

Bear ears and a hairpiece.  These are all made out of hard vinyl and are semi-flexible.  The hairpiece also has two holes that can accommodate this bow.

I usually leave it on the hair extension since I love bows, but it too will fit into the holes on the hairpiece.  I don't usually do that though, because it lies flat and looks more like a weird little flower than a bow.

These can be switched around, just like Candy's other pieces can.  I can also take off Candy's hair completely, though neither she nor I are in love with this look.

"Gimmie back mah hair!"

I will in a minute, Candy.  Since your hair is off I can get a better look at your profile.  Candy has a hard plastic head in a medium-light fleshtone.  Under the glare of my camera it looks sparkly, but I think that's just some the way the plastic reflects the light.  The head is a weird shape, something like an M&M or a Skittle.  It's wide, but it's also flattish, sort of like a Blythe doll's head.

Now back to the front, where Candy's got her grump on.

LOL, she looks a bit like a baby that I know, one who gets her grump on when things don't go her way.  The eyes are detachable and are made of semi-flexible vinyl, and their attachment points are shaped like this.  Notice that they are marked "L" and "R," for left and right, of course.

The corresponding holes in Candy's face are shaped like closed eyes, meaning that it's possible to leave this doll eyeless without her looking too bizarre.

Compare that to Candi's eyes, which look like THIS when her plastic eyes are popped out!

Yeah...I've always wondered if that wasn't part of the reason why we didn't have the Cutie Pops very long, as those painted eyes with the empty hearts are just a tad disturbing.  Granted, they're better than no eyes at all, but they're still a hair disturbing.  Anyway, Candy has a little button nose which is also designed to hold small facial features, and her mouth is small and open.

The mouth also accommodates face pieces; their backs look like this.

Here's what Candy looks like with her face unadorned.  She looks blank but relaxed, like she just went to sleep.

I sleep with my mouth open too, chica.  I wonder if Candy drools in her sleep, LOL!  I like this blank face, but I do sort of wish she had a little paint around her lips.  That way the mouth wouldn't look like the hole that it is.  But then again, painted features don't always look the best, as we saw with Candi, so Mattel probably made the right call here.

Candy's body is made of plastic and vinyl, and it looks a little something like this.

She has joints at the neck, shoulders, wrists, waist, and hips, and she has...well, she has reasonably good mobility in all of them.  She can turn and tilt her head...

...and she can move her arms both out and around.

The arms can't move closer to the body though, which is a bummer.  I would've liked to have posed Candy with her hands together, like she was fooling with her phone or somesuch as that.

Candy and her Lotta Looks sisters take a page out of Monster High's book with detachable hands.

As a result they bend, but they also swivel around like so.  Candy can cock her hands back, like so...

...and she can also flex her hands downward a bit, though not a lot.

As I noted above, she can also rotate them around their point of attachment.

The hands are a little softer than the rest of Candy's body, but they don't have a lot of detail.  They're just big, cartoon hands, one of which is molded to hold a small cell phone.

I don't know how well that hand would hold the phone without the rubber band in place, so I left the band for now.

Candy's body is light pink from the waist down (to simulate tights, I presume), so it's a little tricky to see her waist joint.  It's there though, and it swivels like so.

In fact, it turns all the way around.  Yee-OUCHIE!!!

Regarding legs, candy has joints at the hips but not the knees or the ankles.  The joints have superb lateral and forward movement, meaning that Candy can do side splits...

...and sit...

...but due to the cut of her hips she can't swing her leg back.  Front-back splits are thus out of the question.

Candy's feet are big like her hands are, but they're a bit more elaborate.  She has ten toes and well-defined arches.

I never have understood why doll companies want to put such well-defined toes on a doll with molded tights.  Anyone who wears tights or socks on a regular basis knows that these items obscure the toes and make the foot look rounded.  Oh well, don't guess it matters much, since Candy's default shoes cover her feet completely.  Candy's outfit is...a bit of a mish-mash!

These clothes are interesting in that they're vinyl, but they're also completely removable.  They're also one of my favorite color combinations, yellow and pink.  Yellow and pink, like one of my new hair bows.

Just call me the Bow Belle!  LOL, anyway, I'm going to start where I usually end things, because these shoes clash big time with the rest of the outfit!

Oh sure, they're a lovely shade of orange, and I'll bet they glow under blacklight (we'll find out next week).  But who would dream of pairing Day-Glo orange boots with a strawberry banana-colored outfit???  Not this pretty little raven, that's for sure!  I love committing fashion faux-pas, but this is a little too much even for me!  They help tie Candy's look together though, as some of her spare face pieces have orange makeup.

They're not all the same shade of orange, though.  Go figure, I guess.  Now the dress is a little unusual, as it has...an extra skirt underneath???

Is the outer dress a dress or a babydoll top???  Do people wear skirts with babydoll tops?  I s'pose one could technically pair anything with anything, but it still makes me scratch my head a little with this ensemble.  Either way the dress/top/whatever is a vaguely translucent yellow vinyl, and the pink part is painted on like so.

Remind anyone of Monster High???  Those drippy-looking extensions remind me of the pattern on C.A. Cupid's skirt.  Heavens, has it truly been seven and a half years since I reviewed C.A. Cupid???  The Newtown shooting was the story of the day right around then.  Anywho, Candy's dress opens in the back like so.

The little tabs on the right edge of the opening are supposed to hook into the holes on the left and they work...reasonably well.  Sometimes getting the tabs inserted is a little tricky, and sometimes they don't want to stay, which gets frustrating.  The skirt underneath closes in the same way.

The skirt is made of opaque yellow vinyl and has pink stripes running around the width of it (these go all the way around, YAY!).  The "hem" of the skirt has a molded ruffle, and the upper right hip area has...behold!  The one painting gaffe that I've seen on this product!

One painting gaffe is a bummer, but since Candy's accessories utilize so much paint I'm going to let one futz-up slide.  It's not like I can't repaint that in the future.  Overall I like these pieces quite a bit.  They do remind me a little of the vinyl clothes that millennial Polly Pocket dolls wore, the clothes that could be terribly fragile if mishandled, but I doubt Candy's clothes will tear with the same ease as Polly Pocket's clothes did.

Oh yes, Candy comes with a stand, as all top-heavy dolls should.

This grips Candy around the waist.  It holds her tight enough that she doesn't go tumbling out of it like my old La Dee Da doll did, but not so tight that it squeezes her clothes.  Monster High stands were sometimes problematic in that respect.

The extra face pieces that are available for purchase are just like the pieces Candy came with, but just for the heckuvit I'm going to show y'all anyway.  The pieces come ensconced in little plastic containers that look like makeup compacts with faces.  They also have heart-shaped bits, ostensibly so the compacts can be used as keyrings or whatnot.  These compacts come in orange, aqua, and pink, and they look just like the doll's face.

FYI, those eyes on the front are part of the set, and are not just decorations.  Here's the total contents of the aqua compact.

Two pairs of eyes and three mouths.  One of those mouths appears to be a heart-shaped wad of bubble gum, which would make sense given the eyes that say "POP".  I've GOTTA see how those look together!

Dolls make me smile, scowl, shake my head, or reel with repulsion, but very rarely do they make me laugh until my sides ache.  Candy has done just that.  Though this look is goofy, I like it much better than the frowning visage.  But...something's not right.

There!  I think those neutral eyebrows fit a little better.  Now Candy looks a little less like she's listening to "Bully" and more like she's listening to "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun."  The cloud-shaped eyes and the mouth with the yellow tongue are also a cute combo.

And of course I can add the dog ears and nose to this look...

...or add the braces and switch the eyebrows back again to make Candy look like she's horrified at having pop-eyes.

"CALL THE DOCTOR!!!  My eyes are popping out and I can't reach my ear!!!"

Dang, that mouth is ugly!  This is almost as fun as Mr. Potato Head though, and the "almost as fun" becomes "just as fun" when I add in the other pieces.  Yep, in the span of time that it took for me to put this review together, I found one of the other fashion packs and both of the other blind bag sets.  I used the Donut Bunny outfit, the S'mores Pup eyes, and a couple of random pieces to create this look.

The nose is a bit askew, but...well, bunnies twitch their noses.  I'm glad that I was able to complete the overall "rabbit" look, which I couldn't have done without the blind bag sets, but the blind bag pieces also proved a bit disappointing, as there were a lot of repaints of pieces I already had in another set.  I got two sets of buck teeth, for example...

...and three (yes, three) sets of pouty lips (one of these mouths is Candy's default mouth)...

...and two of that ugly mouth with bared teeth...

...and two tongues...

...and two bubblegums...

...AND two of this...pukey stuff, I guess you could call it.

Seriously, this goes in the doll's mouth and makes them look like they're barfing up Detroit (pop eyes again, LOL).

Those pukey-looking bits are more something I'd expect from MGA Entertainment, with their cotton-pickin' poopy slime unicorns and all that.  Anyway, I can understand why there are a lot of repeats since this is a fairly young doll line; likely Mattel is hesitant to play around with more shapes, since more shapes mean more molds, and more molds mean more money spent on production.  But repetitive shapes still get a hair monotonous after awhile.  Some of the other dolls have still more repeats, as Skate Pop reveals.  She has yet another tongue, yet another pair of pouty lips, and yet another pukey-looking piece.  However, I will note that her pukey piece is at least cute, as it's painted up to look like piano keys.  I can live with redundant shapes if they're painted differently, and Mattel appears to have done just that.  I kind of wish one of these dolls came with a selfie stick, as the ridiculous faces they have look a lot like the ridiculous faces we humans sometimes make when we take our own selfies.  LOL, I know I like to look ridiculous for the rare occasions when I take a selfie!  Yes, I admit that I do it every so often, and I try to look as dumb as I possibly can.  If Hairdorables can come with selfie sticks then Lotta Looks ought to have them too.

I b'lieve I've said enough.  Good stuff and bad stuff.

BAD
*Candy unfortunately suffers a bit from "creepy bug-eyed doll syndrome," rather like Blythe does.  Admittedly she's not as creepy as Blythe, but she could easily give the heebie-jeebies to someone who doesn't like dolls much.
*Small pieces could get lost, swallowed, choked on, or gnawed by pets.  Candy almost lost an eyebrow to one of my dogs during the span of making this post.
*Pieces don't vary in shape much, though colors do vary enough to keep them from getting too boring.
*Might be a little hard to dress; I had a hard time getting Candy's sleeves over her arms since she can't move her arms close together.
*Can't share clothes with any other dolls that I know of.

GOOD
*Idea is fairly original; the Cutie Pops and What's Her Face dolls tinkered with customizable doll faces, but we don't have them anymore!
*I love the colors!  While my doll is predominantly pink (like too many other dolls) other colors are incorporated.
*Gimmick is fairly kid-friendly, though as I noted above small children shouldn't have this toy.
*Colors are bright and eye-catching.
*These have the potential to keep a little kid entertained for hours as she (or less likely, he) comes up with new combinations for the pieces.

Final thoughts?  I thought these dolls looked ridiculous at first, but I've had enjoyed playing with Candy.  These pieces are goofy and silly and fun to mix and match, they stay put...fairly well, and they pop in with a reasonable amount of ease.  Mind y'all, these are NOT for small children; the package says "five and up," and I'd even hesitate to give this doll to a five-year-old, given my fondness for putting odd things in my mouth when I was five.  Have I ever told y'all what a weird little kid I was?  Anywho, this doll is a good toy as long as the kid doesn't put crap in his or her mouth, but for a collector???  Well...Candy is really just for display once her face is in place.  She can't be posed very well, and she can't fit into any of the dollhouses that I've seen, and she can't wear other dolls' clothes.  She's cute, but she lacks the personality of an American Girl or a Monster High doll.  She's just...kinda bland, even with her swappable face pieces.  But then again, the same could be said for Blythe and Cutie Pops, and they have their fans.  But as for me, Candy will likely join the shelf with other dolls that I bought and rarely touch, like Riley and Kikki.  Maybe the three of them can come up with some sort of game to play, though neither Candy nor Riley never appear fond of anyone.  Maybe I can find something to do with Candy, though...that trio gives me some ideas!  But overall I'd say that the Lotta Looks dolls are for kids, not collectors.  They might give a little girl something to do if her school is out for this infernal virus...which in retrospect is a good thing.  We all know how kids can get when they're bored!

Much love,
RagingMoon1987