[A Global Phenomenon?] Why People Are Buying $8,000 Lifelike Baby Dolls

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[jb- Quite informative/splendid/rouching images in this original article were, for some reason, impossible to reproduce in this article]

Kelli Maple tenderly sets her bundle of joy, Naomi, into a Nuna car seat and drives her to the mall. When they arrive, Maple, 23, places little Naomi, dressed in a onesie and hair bow, into a high-end stroller (complete with a portable sound machine, stuffed animal and a pacifier). Giggling, Maple and Naomi shop for tiny clothes. Most passersby would mistake them for a typical mother and daughter.

But Naomi is not real.

She’s a lifelike “reborn doll.” These collectible baby dolls, which can run up to $10,000 apiece, have been around since the early 2000s, but in recent years they’ve exploded into a global phenomenon. Collectors, who consider themselves parents, shell out for luxury baby gear and dote on their reborns as if they were human children. In Brazil, they’ve become a lightning rod in recent months, with politicians introducing bills to try and ban the popular dolls from public places.

The reborn doll world is hidden in plain sight in the United States. It’s a cottage industry, with amateur crafters hand-molding and painting dolls in their basements. The process, especially for the more verisimilitudinous silicone dolls, is labor-intensive, including painting delicate pale-blue veins onto their soft peachy skin and hand-rooting individual goat or alpaca hairs into their scalps and eyebrows. The result is uncanny.

Detractors find the dolls creepy, and some owners say they are taunted by families and online bullies. What these critics misunderstand, collectors say, is the therapeutic potential of the dolls. Women who have lost babies or experienced miscarriages are comforted by reborns. The dolls can also soothe women with post-traumatic stress disorder, Alzheimer’s, dementia and autism. Britney Spears, who said she had a miscarriage, has been seen carrying a doll. Some women are fanatic collectors, amassing dozens if not hundreds of dolls and posting online videos of diaper changes and trips to the park. Children and teens play with them. Hollywood snaps them up as stunt babies. 

At the Dolls of the World fair this June, around 1,500 participants—and their dolls—came together in a convention center in Greensboro, N.C., where vendors sold accessories such as perfumes meant to make the dolls smell like real babies.

“People think it’s insane because it’s a doll,” said Hannah Hammond, 21, a teacher in Hampton, Va., who collects reborns. “But it’s just like any other hobby.” When we met, she offered to let me hold her prized silicone doll, Evie, then winced at my technique: “You have to support her head.”

Babies Who Never Cry

Maple is one of the stars of the reborn doll world, with over 2 million subscribers to her YouTube channel and selling her dolls for thousands of dollars. At the Dolls of the World expo, she was mobbed by fans for selfies and autographs. She had spent months in the room she calls her “nursery,” putting the finishing touches on babies to sell at her booth at the fair. “There are heads and limbs everywhere—it can be a little scary,” she said. 

Awareness of the dolls is at an all-time high. “It’s just getting bigger and stronger,” said Dave Stack, the founder of Reborns.com, one of the largest marketplaces for handmade dolls. He charges $30 a month for makers to sell their dolls on the site, and has around 600 paying members. 

Many of those makers were at the fair in North Carolina, one of a handful of American events where enthusiasts and dealers can buy and sell dolls, and take classes in the art of dollmaking. At evening events, women trade gifts like pacifiers and doll outfits, and awards are bestowed to the top artisans.

The doll fair was one of three conferences taking place at the same sprawling Sheraton complex. Over the course of one sweltering summer weekend, the doll people rubbed elbows with the brawny participants in the World Ninja League championships and the conspiracy theorists of the Cosmic Summit.

 

“We all thought they were real babies until we did not hear any crying,” marveled Cosmic Summit attendee Ocean Norris while taking a smoke break. Her friend Angela Simmons of Pinehurst, N.C., said she was “shocked” to see the babies being handled like real babies. 

“Unfortunately, we get a lot of hate in the doll community,” said Sally McMahon of Massapequa Park, N.Y., who dressed in a fairy outfit and showed off her rabbit-human hybrid doll. This is part of a subset known as “fantasy dolls”—creatures such as chimp-human hybrids, blue lizard-skinned elves and tiny-horned satyrs. “They say, ‘Oh my God, these crazy doll people.”

 

For the doll lovers, from small children to senior citizens in wheelchairs, the fair is a rare safe space for them to revel in their hobby. Many of them budget the entire year to be able to pay cash for four-figure dolls and accessories (“I plan on spending a kidney, a lung and part of my liver,” joked attendee Mel Harrison on Facebook). They clamored around the reborn world’s niche celebrity doll artists, like Maple and the British duo Samantha Gregory and Nikki Johnston, asking for autographs and selfies. All around the hotel, groups clustered, with women and children passing babies around.

While reborn lovers find them comforting, the outside world often perceives them as terrifying. The Apple TV+ show “Servant,” which ran from 2019 to 2023, dramatized the spooky nature of reborn dolls.

Maggie Barnes, 12, from Clayton, N.C., showed me her new doll: Fang, a miniature werewolf. Barnes said she liked coming to the fair because “People are not judgmental at all.” Her mother, also a doll fan, purchased the $1,000 doll for her as a gift.

Although the best-known use for reborn dolls is as a comfort following infant loss and miscarriage, plenty of kids, as well as mothers and grandmothers of real children collect the dolls. Keith and Dia Harris, 63 and 51 of Suwanee, Ga., have five children and seven grandchildren, and attended the fair with a baby reborn and a 6-year-old reborn. Keith, hoisting the bigger doll around in a carrier, was one of the many supportive husbands at the fair. At their home, the Harrises have a nursery for their reborns with bunkbeds, which their grandkids share with the dolls when they visit.

Another grandmother, Holly Church, came to the fair to purchase a $3,200 green-skinned fantasy doll to add to her collection. Her husband was building a “she shed” in their backyard in Texas to house the dolls. She said that her eldest son didn’t understand her passion. “I say, ‘You don’t have to get it. You just have to respect it.’”

Church’s friend Mia Martone, a spiritual advisor in East Meadow, N.Y., purchased a $6,000 silicone reborn named Lucy at the fair. While she has grandchildren who visit, she said, “Sometimes I just want one that doesn’t cry.”

Reborns can help people heal from trauma. Katherine Hansell of St. Charles, Mo., cares for Crystal, her adopted adult daughter who experienced horrific childhood abuse. They use a reborn baby named Crystal to model love and care. “We say that this Crystal was never hurt,” said Hansell. 

A Labor of Love

Making dolls can be an emotional job.

 

Dorothy Blue, a reborn dollmaker who works out of a basement studio in Dardenne Prairie, Mo., said that working with women who’d gone through infant loss and wanted a replica could be fraught. Sometimes, their vision of what the doll should look like could be hard to capture. “To be blunt, a deceased baby looks like a deceased baby,” said Blue.

The labor that goes into creating well-made silicone dolls is significant. With products including paint, finishing powder, glass eyes and hair, the supplies for one doll can easily run over $500.

Well-made silicone dolls can easily sell for over $5,000, because the labor that goes into them is significant. [JB emphasis] Most dollmakers [JB -- Dollarmakers?] start with a basic kit from one of the online retailers such as Bountiful Baby. Then they personalize it through a painstaking process of tweaking and painting, often in dialogue with the client, who may have photos of what they want the doll to look like. Vinyl kits usually start around $100 and silicone kits run about $200. With products including paint, finishing powder, glass eyes and hair, the supplies for one doll can easily run over $500.

America has a long tradition of resourceful women cobbling together careers from home. Like selling Mary Kay beauty products or Tupperware, dollmaking can be a way to make money without a fancy education, or even consistent childcare. 

Few people have gotten rich from the doll world, because it’s such a splintered, handmade process. But Nevin and Denise Pratt of Bountiful Baby in Salt Lake City are titans in the reborn community. In 2000, Denise’s doll making spurred the duo to begin making molds, which grew into a significant doll supply company. At its height in 2019, the company says its revenue was over $5 million. It’s 40% less today, which they attribute to a volatile economy and Chinese-made knockoff dolls and parts sold on sites like Amazon and Alibaba.

This year, Maple only sold three of her handmade dolls, compared to five at the last fair. “Sales have been down all year because of the economy.”

But for Maple and others in the reborn doll industry, it’s much more than a business. “I’ve gone through lots of different emotional things throughout my life and the dolls have definitely helped with mental health a lot,” she said.

Johnston, the British dollmaker, compared reborn dolls to Marmite, the divisive yeasty spread: “You either love them or you hate them.”

Write to Rory Satran at rory.satran@wsj.com