Have you heard of BunchEms? These little plastic balls covered in hooks like Velcro that you stick together to make shapes and stuff?
The first I heard of them was when I came across posts about getting BunchEms out of little kids' hair...
Now, I am someone that is Good at detangling and retexturing synthetic doll hair. I saw an American Girl Julie on shopgoodwill.com with BunchEms in her hair and got curious.
Are they really THAT hard to get out of hair, or were the people doing it just not that great at detangling?
I'll spare you the suspense and say that yes, they really are that horrible. I think it would be more humane to just cut the child's hair and let it grow out again rather than make them sit through an attempt at removing The Devil's Dingleberries.
I didn't win the auction for Julie but was talking to my doll friends and said that if I ever happened to find BunchEms and a doll I didn't care about at Goodwill at the same time, I'd grab them so I could experience this hell for myself.
This is a Battat Our Generation (Target's version of American Girl) Phoebe. You can't really see her before-hair well, but it wasn't in too bad of condition. It was matted in a couple spots, very dirty, and had grass stuck in it.
I do wish I'd cleaned and detangled her before I did this. The dirtiness had everyone in the house sneezing.
But wow was that exciting. I enjoyed being the destroyer instead of the fixer for once. That was fun.
Removing them again was not. That was the opposite of fun.
It took me about a month because I had to stop for a medical emergency and was only able to work on her again last week. Since I'm going through a series of surgeries I've had a lot of non-productive time. I just finished her hair up today.
The BunchEms were very difficult to remove. It took a lot of careful, slow, agonizing combing and brushing, picking and pulling, some ripping and tearing, to get the hair free from each little ball's many, multidirectional teeth.
What's worse is that as I would work on the balls nearer the ends of her hair, the ones closer to her face got tighter and tighter into her hairline.
They were pushing against her skin at this point.
I'd get some hair free, put it to the side, and discover it had reattached to different BunchEms on that side.
It was tedious. If Phoebe were a real girl, she'd be in agony from all of the pulling and combing and how tightly the BunchEms were pulling up into her hair.
I did eventually get them all out again. She lost a ton of hair. Battat OG dolls are rooted with the locked loop method, which means that if ONE loop pulls free, then they can all pull free in sequence. A lot of her hair loss was full plugs coming out of her scalp, and a lot of it was breakage. The hair that was left was a mess.
It wasn't tangled at all and was rather soft, though. I guess if you were desperate, a BunchEming could help emulate the texture of 4c hair? There has to be a better way to give a doll 4c hair than this self-torture, though.
A good bath, shampooing, three conditionings, and straightenings later and...
I had to cut out a few inches (I am bad at cutting shh), and her hair still has a lot more texture than it's supposed to.
I do not ever want to do that again.
She's going back to Goodwill to see if someone else wants to adopt her, and the BunchEms are going in the trash because they're full of doll hair and that's kind of gross.
