Snuggled in a Moses basket on Laura Henning’s couch in Smithtown, N.Y., Emily is an undeniably beautiful newborn. Wisps of dark hair frame the baby’s face, her scrunched pout hinting of newly minted dreams.
She has just been sold on eBay for $575, and soon will leave the quilt-lined basket for a cardboard box, priority-mailed to her new “adoptive parents” in Indiana.
“Some people get very attached to them, like it’s their own child,” says Henning, a 31-year-old mother of three, adjusting Emily’s magnetized pacifier. “I’ve had people say, `Give her a snuggle for me when you ship her.”‘
Highly realistic dolls like Emily have a quasi-sci-fi, quasi-evangelical moniker–“reborns.” Popularized on the eBay auction site, “reborning” has become a cyber cottage industry pioneered mostly by stay-at-home moms who see it as an avenue for artistic expression and extra income.
Most reborn dolls start life as cheap vinyl babies made by a German company named Berenguer, some of which sell in the Kmart toy aisle for as little as $20. But at the hands of self-taught artists such as Henning, they are disassembled and rebuilt in a transformation worthy of Michael Jackson: Hair and eyelashes are rerooted with mohair or, sometimes, real human hair. Mouths are spliced open, eyes replaced. Bodies are reweighted with sand or kitty litter to replicate the heft of a real baby. Faces and limbs are tinted inside and out, then painted in countless layers to simulate the blush-suffused, vein-traced translucence of newborn skin. Then, the creation is given a name.
The end result is a doll so realistic that some newborn artists receive indignant e-mails, admonishing them for selling live children on eBay.
The birds and the Berenguers
Nobody quite knows how “reborning” was born, says Dawn Marie Garma of Lupton, Mich., who has been creating these lifelike dolls for two years.
“I think it started when someone took apart a Berenguer doll, colored it inside to give a lifelike tone,” then sold her handiwork on eBay, she says. From there, it has snowballed into a tight-knit online community.
In a corner of Henning’s living room is a plastic storage container crammed with the tools of her trade: Pure acetone to strip off factory-issue paint. Tubes of oil-based paints. Marine glue to secure glass eyes. Stringable lettered beads for making ID bracelets.
Preemies are extremely popular, Henning explains, nodding in the direction of Autumn, a red-haired preemie who recently sold on eBay for $305. Details count, right down to the magnetic umbilical cord that attaches to Autumn’s navel.
“It’s an evolving art–a year ago, we weren’t sculpting faces or removing the molded hair,” says Henning, whose living-room walls are covered with baby pictures of her three children. She has spent hours, she says, staring at her sleeping daughter, 2-year-old Izabella–for whom her Web site, www.bellababiesnursery.com, is named–trying to capture the flush of a cheek, the curl of an eyelash.
“My husband never knows when he comes home if it’s dinner or body parts in there,” she continues, nodding in the direction of the convection oven. Once a doll’s vinyl skin has been heated to the point where it is workable, Henning’s oven-mitted hands manipulate the face into an expression she wants, then she plunges it into cold water to set.
Multi-motivations
For their part, reborning artists say their motivations are as individual and unique as the dolls themselves.
“Barbie and I share the same birthdate, but we don’t look the same–her body is more proportionate than mine,” jokes Monica Diggs, 44, of Conyers, Ga., a mother of two teenage girls who co-owns a civil rights consulting firm and teaches water aerobics. “Growing up, there were not many African-American dolls that were attractive. I got into reborning with the purpose of offering very pretty babies of color.”
Diggs sells her ethnic reborn dolls on her Web site, www.nappyheadedsue.com. Her daughter came up with a name for them: “She said, `Why don’t you call them Koffee Kids, because we come in so many colors?”‘
`Like potato chips . . .’
If reborning artists are obsessed about their creations, the collectors who covet them aren’t far behind. Barbara Tyler, 67, has acquired “30-plus” reborn dolls over the past two years. They’re everywhere in her Shelton, Conn., home–on armchairs in the living room, on a bench in the computer room, even in a bassinet normally occupied by her visiting great-grandchild, who probably will have to wait until she is much older to play with one. Delicate and detailed, reborn dolls are made for adults, not children.
“It’s an addiction, like potato chips,” says Tyler, who had one doll made to resemble her late son in babyhood. It also has become quite expensive: A year ago, $300 was considered a top price for a decent-quality reborn doll; these days, that’s on the low end.
Arguably one of the best-known and most successful reborn artists in the country is a woman who will identify herself only as Kimberly Angel from Idaho. Selling under the eBay user name “Angel* Babies,” Angel is a self-described perfectionist: Each of her babies has tens of thousands of micro-rooted hair follicles and a custom cloth body with silicone inserts to simulate baby fat, and is accompanied by a handmade quilt.
It takes a month, sometimes longer, for Angel to make a doll, and when they do finally hit eBay, her creations can fetch in the thousands, like Cassandra, who sold recently for a whopping $3,250. Admittedly, her materials–such as expensive mohair for the hair rooting and pricey Baby Beau & Belle outfits as a finishing flourish–don’t come cheap. But the dolls still bring a tidy profit for the stay-at-home mother of two.
“I started doing them as a way to help support my family. I’d never in a million years dreamed that I’d get this response,” says Angel, who does not accept private commissions or have a Web site. She also never expected to experience a backlash of nasty e-mails, fake electronic bids, even, she says, death threats from other reborners jealous at how much her dolls were bringing on eBay.
“To me, it’s a very serious art form,” Angel says, adding that she dreams of each baby she creates. “On eBay, there are quite a few people trying to cash in on reborning who don’t know what they’re doing.” She’s heard stories of dolls painted with makeup, stuffed with dirt, rubbed with Armor All.
“Everyone’s doing it for the money, because if people don’t buy them, you can’t make more,” Angel acknowledges. But there’s something almost mystical about creating these tiny individuals.
“Certain babies speak to certain people–they remind them of a certain child,” concludes Angel, who says she can’t imagine not reborning. “I have a lifetime of babies in my mind.”
