Pullip Princess Customs - Rapunzel

While I love my custom Pullips dearly, only one of them had the correct eye color. Rapunzel, while beautiful, had big brown eyes instead of big green eyes. Merida’s eyes were flat green instead of blue, and Howl’s eyes were grey-brown instead of flat green.

So, after consulting with one of my more knowledgeable Pullip-collecting friends, I went off to CoolCat, the leading online store for Pullip eyechips. CoolCat has an enormous selection of chips – flat colors, matte colors, double-colored, you name it – and most are only $3.50.

I was a bit leery of ordering at first – they’re based in Taiwan, and the last time I did an overseas transaction (my very first eBay auction, poor newbie who didn’t know about the AG grey market), it never arrived. But CoolCat was great at communication, shipping was only $3.00, and the package arrived safely and well within the estimated time.

Now, I had some experience opening up Pullip heads and poking around. Merida’s head had been opened when I installed her Obitsu body, and Rapunzel had some eye problems from the start. Whatever had crushed her box and smushed her nose had also damaged her eye mechanism. One eye had been jammed closed, the other wouldn’t close, and the lever that controlled her eye direction had a broken piece. The night I bought her, I spent a fair amount of my evening bent over my worktable, painstakingly repairing the eye damage. I spent a lot of time not breathing, and mentally repeating “I only spent $40, if this goes pear-shaped, it was only $40.” The good part is that Pullip eye mechs are pretty self-explanatory, so it was easy to tell where things were supposed to go.

Just as a note – Pullip eyemechs, when out of the head? SUPER CREEPY. Like, these two huge staring lidless eyeballs attached to this hellish plastic contraption. I have a pretty high tolerance toward creepy doll stuff, but I did my best not to look at those eyes until they were reinstalled.

So, when the CoolCat order arrived, I sat down to perform a three-way eyeswap. 

he first step was to paint the backs of the chips. The chips are translucent, so there’s no actual pupil. A dab of black acrylic paint on each chip did the trick nicely.

The second step was to prep my patients – removing clothes and wigs. Howl was the only one with a wig still glued on!

A few hours later (read, after my kid had gone to bed and my husband had retreated downstairs to play video games), we were ready to start. I’m not going to go into the full process of chip-swapping; there are good tutorials here and here. Rapunzel was my first patient:

The eyemech and one of the stock eyechips. 

I’m saving those for my eventual Belle custom.

I was, again, not breathing during this step – sure, the “it’s only $40” mantra was still true, but by now I’d become attached to her!

New chips in. See what I mean about the creepy?

After shot:

The eyes were a little silvery and shiny for my taste – in the light of the Dollcave, they had an eerie and sinister glow. Check this out!

That is not a Rapunzel who bash you over the head with a frying pan and then make you take her to a kingdom-wide party. That is a Rapunzel that will bash you over the head with a frying pan and devour your soul.

Turns out, all the CoolCat chips come with this silver, prismatic laser-paper backing that gives them extra luminosity and sparkle. While the effect is very cool – just wait until you see Merida’s eyes – it was a little overdone on Rapunzel. Fixing it was easy (aside from the bit where I had to take her all apart again) – I removed the little circles of paper, flipped them over, and colored the blank side green with a colored pencil. I put the backing back on with the green side forward, reinstalled everything, and…

RAPUNZEL!

Her eyes are still very luminous, but they don’t have the creepy silver glow.

Next up is Merida - her wig arrived TODAY, so I will be combining her eye and wig changes into the next post. Stay tuned!