The Temu baby

Well, I finally did it:  I heeded the call of trendy online shopping site Temu.  Temu offers lots of things for ridiculously cheap, but they also back up their online listings with reviews and owner pics...I think.  Maybe those reviews were done by Temu employees.  But anyway, I ordered a reborn baby doll...sort of (she's mass-produced), and I did this for three reasons.  One, to see if Temu was worth the hype.  Two, her sales pic was cute.  We all know how enticing sales pics can be...and also how misleading they can be.  Three, reviews said she's soft...which is exactly what eBay said about one of my other baby dolls, Mei.

Mei is a Ping Lau sculpt, something I can't resist, but she is definitely NOT soft!  Her vinyl is fairly hard, like that of a Wal-Mart baby doll or a Middleton doll like Adam.  For the record, Adam was not advertised as having soft vinyl...or at least, his Middleton brothers and sisters were not.

I like Adam better than Mei, overall.  He feels like a real baby in my arms, and who could resist that smile?

I will note that while neither Adam nor Mei have squishy vinyl, their cloth bodies are very soft.  With the right tools, both dolls could make superb reborn dolls.  Alas, I don't have the tools, the skills, the space, or the time to get the job done, so that's why I bought my own reborn.  

Bloviating over, my package came wrapped in orange Temu plastic and copious tape, but I was able to get it all cut off with no fuss.  The baby came in this box, entitled iCradle.  Never heard of it...<pauses to consult Google>...yep, they're mass-produced!  Wal-Mart and Amazon carry these, for about the same price (forty to fifty bucks American) that I paid for my doll.  Here's the box.

The box was not fastened shut, so I flipped it open and was mildly chagrined to see that this baby had zero padding.  She does have a plastic bag holding her together, but nothing else to protect her from scuffs.

As it turned out, I didn't need to worry about scuffs too much, but we'll see why in a bit.  Are y'all ready to see her?  Here she is!

Well...her hair certainly looks mass-produced!  See how it's painted like Mei's?

Wait a minute, I forgot to show y'all how the new baby compares in size to Adam and Mei!

Adam and Mei look like bigger dolls, but that's largely because the new doll's legs are molded in a bent position.  My Real Baby, Geneva, genuinely is bigger than the new girl. 

Geneva is just a big doll, period.  She would be a lapful for Sandy McCall, even more so than Salome was.  Anyway, the new doll has visible sutures in her skull.  See her soft spot?

I don't know beans from bull's foot about babies, but I do know that the sutures only tend to be visible when the baby is very small.  I remember Miss Emily musing about this when she was reborning Saskia, because Saskia was clearly an older baby...but she still had sutures visible.  But anyway...my mama calls this baby "Sandra," so I guess that's what I'll call her, but regardless Sandra has visible sutures.  She's also got visible veins in places (Mei, Adam, and Geneva do not, nor were they meant to).  I knew that reborn dolls sometimes have this (one of Miss Emily's dolls did), but with Sandra being mass-produced I wasn't expecting it.  Maybe someone did take the time to reborn this gal a little before I got her.  I had a hard time photographing the veins, but if you look closely you can see one right in front of her ear.  It looks like a little red lighting bolt.

She even has manicured nails!

Pretty cool!  Some folks don't like this level of realism on their dolls, and for other folks a few painted veins wouldn't be realistic enuff.  I'm not picky, so Sandra does me just fine.  She does have more blushing than I'd like in places, though.  Her wrists and her ankles are the pinkest.

I wonder why the joints are the most blushed here?  Babies don't crawl on their wrists and ankles!

Odd blushing aside, sometimes reborn dolls come with accessories and sometimes they don't.  I was delighted to see that Sandra did indeed come with several little freebies.  She's got her own headband, binky, bottle, and birth certificate, and I retained the tag for the sake of future reference.

Here's what the back of the tag says.  It's got a couple of examples of Engrish.

CHOCKING hazard!  LOL, it gets the point across, but I can't help giggling at that.  I love translation foibles!  I want to point out the binky, because...well, because even though it LOOKS like a real binky...

...it's not.  Adam and Geneva won't be using this bad boy!

It's got a magnet in it, as does Sandra's mouth.  Sandra can thus look like she's sucking on it, AND I can turn it any ol' way I want!

Usually babies get the binky oriented in their mouths correctly, but not always.  This comes off easily, by the way.  The magnet holds, but it only takes a gentle tug to separate doll from binky.  I make note of this because we all know how magnets can cling, and how babies can be stubborn!  

I'll also touch on the headband, even though it's just a soft piece of elastic with a lace bow attached.  

It stretches to fit and looks very becoming on Sandra.  It would probably fit Mei and Geneva too, but I'm leaving it on Sandra.

If Sandra is like all the babies I've known, then she probably HATES "having that ol' thing on her head," as my grandmother would've put it.  If Sandra were a real baby I wouldn't force the issue, but since she isn't real I'm having my way, LOL.

Overall Sandra is about what I expected from Temu.  She's a nice doll, but not on equal footing with the ridiculously priced uber-reborn dolls one can find on eBay.  She reminds me a bit of Adley and Annabelle, the two little semi-reborns that visited me at the library last fall, except that like Adam and Mei they were bigger than Sandra.  Even though Sandra isn't super-duper detailed she IS a nice little doll, one that could stand up to gentle play from a child and a fair amount of cuddling from an adult collector, just as Adley and Annabelle could.  She's also a good doll for a newbie to the reborn world, like I kinda, sorta am.  She is soft, just as advertised, and I've never, repeat, EVER had a doll that could hang on to her own binky.  I am curious about what iCradle's other products are like now; do they all come with little veins, or did someone legit work Sandra over a little before sending her to me?  I don't know, and I have no intention to find out since I don't need another baby in this size.  Adam, Sandra, and Mei are quite enuff for me!  Oh yeah, and Geneva, but she's kinda in a class of her own.  For some reason I'm extremely fond of Geneva, and I may do a post just for her one day.  

Baby Love,

RagingMoon1987