Diving into Shadow High by MGA Entertainment (Part 1)

 I'm not generally attracted to the doll brands of toy mainstay MGA Entertainment. 

I feel like a lot of their stuff is very image-focused and trend-chasing to the point of creating shallow characters defined primarily by superficial looks, and their material often features painfully forced attempts to sound cool for the kids-- the L.O.L. franchise is absolutely nauseating to read any of the names and packages of due to how forced and inauthentic (and even appropriative) the slang can be. I also have concerns about MGA's demographic-inappropriate marketing, as a lot of their dolls are dressed in fashion you wouldn't really want your young kids to be idolizing...and even worse, there are numerous MGA dolls that use infantilized or genuinely infant designs who have been made out in much more adult styling than feels appropriate, even for fiction. MGA has had a lot of material that can feel outright trashy or concerning. 

So it's hard for me to get so on board. Mattel is generally more my style, with more concern for child-friendliness and richer characters and social messaging while still keeping fashion interesting and fun.

But there are strong counterpoints to be offered to those reasons MGA can often repel me. While there are trends in the company's output, by no means is it a creative monolith, after all. MGA's material often crosses the line for me, and I won't excuse a lot of it, but there is a lighter side to the edge MGA puts out that can be well-described as "selling the kids what they actually want, rather than what their parents tell them to want." And edgy toys are precisely what Mattel seems terrified of selling to kids today...after making me a fan of Mattel because of them. MGA's work seems kind of made to scratch that itch for more dark fabulosity in dolls, and Shadow High in particular feels fairly transparently tailored to appeal to MH's golden-age audience in what seems like a pretty darn earned taunt--"Hey, Mattel, you stopped making edgy ultraweird dolls in your mass releases because you thought they'd hurt you, but look at us; we'll do freaky glam and do numbers with it--don't you regret going soft now?" Also, Rainbow High and Shadow High seemed to strike an appealing balance. Their dolls are highly stylized, but in a more elegant way than Bratz or LOL's more unrealistic styles, and the characters look fierce or pretty without looking mean, totally vapid, or like cartoon gremlins. 

And all indications are that MGA tends to grind Mattel's face into the dirt when it comes to the craftsmanship of their doll clothing. I wanna see what I've been missing there.

Rainbow High, the original franchise of these shared-universe duo brands, was not something that interested me. 

Rainbow High wave 1 left to right-- Ruby Anderson, Poppy Rowan, Sunny Madison, Jade
Hunter, Skyler Bradshaw, and Violet Willow. They're a spectrum of Roy G. BV. 

I collect fantasy dolls, not stylish dolls of humans. But Shadow High, its sister line in the same universe, made a big splash with greyscale-themed debut characters, and future waves with bright colors, fantasy skin tones, and fantastical character themes. 

Shadow High wave 1, left to right--Natasha Zima, Heather Grayson, Ash Silverstone, Nicole Steel,
Luna Madison (Sunny's sister), and Shanelle Onyx. They're a nice grayscale spectrum, with the lines between Heather/Ash and Ash/Nicole being very subtle.

The Shadow High characters make zero sense to me conceptually. How are these pitch-black, alienesque, or neon-pale kids supposed to be taken as average humans from real-world cities and states? I dunno! But I do know that they're dark, edgy, fabulous, and really darn striking and that I can have them be whoever I want. (I've checked out Rainbow High's animation, and the characters as shown there don't strike me as anything I can get value from at my current age.)

I ended up getting multiple characters from the first two mainline waves to experience some breadth in the brand's variety, since I had Amazon credit to spare from my birthday gifts. This will be a two-part overview, so final thoughts (boy, there's a lot of  'em) will be stated in the next post. It turns out this became both a toy review and a quality control study!

Let's see the characters in the spotlight for this post.

The first Shadow High character to catch my eye was Shanelle Onyx, who represented pure black on the greyscale spectrum of the first wave. Shanelle's use of stark color contrast was super compelling (I'm a big sucker for stark monochrome) and she felt like a really subversive spooky doll on the shelf--like a literal shadow of a classic toy. I knew she needed to be my introduction. Stark white Natasha Zima on the other end of the spectrum didn't appeal to me as much due to lacking the fun contrast featured in Shanelle's ensemble, and her outfits didn't grab me. What ultimately killed Natasha for me, though, was pictures of her in real life showing her head's color wasn't as stark white and dramatic as I'd have liked and that it mismatched her body.

I was next intrigued by Rexx McQueen, a wave 2 boy character similar to Shanelle. Rexx has the same stark black coloration and an amazing puffy coat and nice hoodie that I just had to check out. Wave 2 is pretty stacked with compelling dolls. I adored Zooey Electra's alien look (you won't wait long to see her at all here) and Monique Verbena looked like a gorgeous, vibrant, big presence with awesome hair. I also liked Karla Choupette's style and on a weak day, you could even sweet-talk me into Reina "Glitch" Crowne, who looks really nice in person. But Rexx was the first one I needed to see.

Here's their two boxes, which show off the shift in the RH/SH brand's packaging between the two main SH waves.

While I ended up unboxing Shan first, I took them both out in succession...and since Rexx was the doll who was less documented in what I'd seen,  he gets the honor of first review. 

The Shadow High wave 2 packaging is a simpler rectangle shape with everything mounted on one slide-in backdrop inside the box. The back of the box features two of the six characters, with the same art for each of those two doll's boxes. Rexx and Glitch share back art, Monique and Karla share back art, and Dia and Zooey share back art.

Rexx's eye color in this art is completely different from his doll's.

It just so happens that of the wave 2 dolls I got, I didn't complete any of these pairs, so I got no redundant box art.

The left face of the box (when turned from a front view) features a printed seal with the character's name and design focus at the Shadow High school. The wave 2 version of the seal is metallic silver without a holographic rainbow effect, which makes more sense to me. The wave 1 boxes inherited a lot of holo rainbow packaging from their sister brand, but it looks weird with the edgier, less vibrant SH. Fewer rainbows work here.

None of the wave 2 characters are labeled with divergent or interesting design focuses--all of them seem to be plain old fashion design. Weird, since Rexx's short bio describes him as more of a visual artist, and Zooey's laptop screen and graphic-covered costume indicate strongly to me that she specializes in fashion graphic design. Did MGA just give up on personalizing the character seals this time?

The front window and backdrop of these boxes have contrasting sketch artwork of the doll character, with the window's lines being white and the backdrop's being black. Rexx in the line art doesn't have his necklace, and his hoodie strings are tied in a bow, while on the doll, they're loose. I wouldn't be surprised if these pieces of art were actual development sketches for the dolls done by the art team during the design phase.

Rexx himself is attached in the middle of the box, while his stand pole, comb, and hangers are on the left wall and the accessories are put on a popout "table" under a plastic shell and sealed by a cardboard layer.

Rexx's packaging may be simpler than the wave 1 boxes, but it felt like more of a fight to undo. His stand base and clip are tagged to the backdrop under the plastic shell cradle holding the doll, meaning I had to do some tearing to get the cradle off the backdrop enough to grab the stand parts. This also made it harder to cut his head's tie tags, so I ultimately cut them from the front, not the back. With him having no fiber hair, that was actually pretty easy.

Here's everything that was in the box.

The Shadow High doll stands are translucent glittery plastic that match one of the doll's main colors, and have studs and bands around the edge that make them look more edgy and more like fashion-model stages to me, while the Rainbow High equivalent is an untextured puck. The stands are three pieces, with a pole, a clip, and a base.

 The pole is "H"-shaped, and features a stopper near the top where the clip pushes down to stop at just the right waist height. The clips have a hollow bottom edge and a smooth top edge. At the base, the stands just plug into a hole which I find to be too shallow. Several times, the weight of a doll ended up rocking the base of the pole and making it fall out of the stand. These poles should have either snapped in like Monster High stands or plugged in a fair bit deeper into the stand so they wouldn't be pulled out too easily. After reviewing more of these dolls, I've also found that those with tighter, thinner outfits tend to fall forward out of the clips a little too easily. Still, the stands are functional and the bases are sturdy, so I'm very glad to get them. Dolls with big coats like this have to have the clip slipped under the coat layer and the coat pulled down over the pole, since the grip around the waist will be hindered and squish the outfit otherwise. This isn't bad, though, since the coats can actually help the dolls stay clipped in!

The dolls come with combs, which are half-flat and half with wide teeth.

I don't think the flat half of the comb has any practical function, and I just use a small human comb with both wide and fine teeth on my dolls. It's more common to see dolls with brushes rather than combs, so perhaps there's intrigue there, but overall, I don't find the inclusion necessary--especially not for dolls like all-flocked Rexx or microbraided Monique who have no combable hair. 

The Wave 2 dolls also come with two clothes hangers each (also matched to the characters' colors, though most of them have a clearly different color for the combs and stands compared to the brushes), which is far from useful on dolls with single outfits. There's one hanger that can fit into torso clothing pieces with sleeves or straps, and a clippy hanger that can hold onto pants or skirts or miscellany.

The top hanger could have theoretically been used for pants if the "Shadow" text hadn't been there.

Rexx has three accessories.

First is his phone, which comes with a phone case the base phone realistically slides into from the front, though the fit isn't perfect. The base phone pieces are pretty realistic and different colors on the back depending on the doll.

Each wave 2 doll has a phone and case, while no wave 1 dolls did. The two pieces are separable by pushing the phone out through the case's camera hole with a narrow object. The phone cases are personalized, and the phone screens vary per each SH wave 2 doll. 

The back of Rexx's phone case has a black design that is hard to see without the light hitting it. 

Rexx's phone screen shows a fairly nonspecific text conversation with Glitch occurring. 

I later learned that Glitch's phone is in accordance with Rexx's, showing the same conversation from her side.

The phone cases have two small thin prongs that clip around the underside of the dolls' left thumbs to allow the phones to be held in their hands. 

These prongs feel a little fragile to me, and the fit is a little delicate, but I found this system to be far more practical and convincing than the equivalent Monster High phones, which have bracket-like thumb loops that four times out of five do not align with the dolls' thumbs or fit them well for realistic display in the hand. 

G3 Twyla failing to naturally hold her phone.

Second is a drink bottle of "Glittorade--Shadow Remix", parodying Gatorade drinks. I'm assuming based on the brand-specific subtitle that at least one non-shady Glittorade bottle was included in the Rainbow High line. The bottle is slightly translucent, and the appearance is pretty good. 

Rexx can kind of squeeze the cap into the cups of his hands to hold the bottle, but it's not easy to do and doesn't look very natural when it's done. 

Finally, Rexx has his laptop computer, an accessory that Zooey also features. Rexx's laptop is all silver and has an aligned black sticker on the front with a "Shadow" logo parodying the Supreme brand (which in turn ripped off the political artwork of artist Barbara Kruger). 

The underside of the keyboard is translucent enough to show the molded keys through the bottom.

When opened, the laptop screen displays a Macintosh-style desktop and an interface Rexx is logging into. The background of the window is artwork of the wave 1 SH kids and features glitchy effects, possibly related to Reina or the general SH interference in the Rainbow Vision contest to make a name for themselves. Also on the desktop is an opened image file of a toothy mouth graphic, which you can see the clicked-on icon for on the right, and the background desktop image has an Asian-language character and obscured text of a date that may correspond with the first wave of dolls' release, and/or the date in-universe of the Rainbow Vision contest?

Shanelle is included in the window artwork, but she really fades into the background at this print quality!

When they use both hands, these dolls can carry these laptops by holding the sides of the keyboard section with their thumbs on the top surface. It's a bit of a fiddle to slide them in and get the posing right, but the dolls can be posed in a stable and plausible manner holding their computers. Otherwise, of course, you can set them up with their laptops on a table if you have somewhere for them to sit.

His coat is so thick that you can, with some fiddling, squeeze the laptop closed under his arm with his elbow bent toward his hip.

Here's Rexx himself, right out of the box.

I think MGA walked a very tricky line with Shanelle and Rexx. Both are stylized as stark dramatic black, but both are also Black-coded racially, and while I think that's probably correct (if you're having black characters in a group of stylized greyscale humans, then yes, make them Black), it's also something that could be horrifically racist without a lot of care. I think MGA prevented this by emphasizing style and glamor (a positive consequence of the fashion-first theme here) and avoiding cruelly caricatured features or color choices (for example, Shanelle's got a lovely subtle dark lip color, whereas white, bright red or pink would have been absolutely horrific on her). They also balance it by featuring White-coded characters like Natasha and Karla who are exaggeratedly pale (literal white on the former), as well as several in-betweens, including grey or vivid fantasy colors for other dark-skinned or Black characters like Luna and Monique that provide more variety to dark skin in this fantasy brand and make it obvious that MGA is just being visually artsy across the board with these Shadow kids. 

I also think Rexx makes a stronger visual counterpart to Natasha Zima than Shanelle does, since Shan is black with significant black/white contrast while Rexx lands more "all black" in a manner more comparable to Natasha's "all white". Heather Grayson from wave 1 is a better counterpart for Shanelle due to having a similarly stark color-contrast theme, even though her skin isn't as pale as Natasha's.

Rexx's hair is entirely flocked to mimic very close-cut hair, marking a first for boy dolls in RH/SH, though the boys do have a lot of flocked hair mixed with the rooted on the other dolls. Rexx's hair is black and features some great shaping, with two notches at the top of the hairline and a faux-shaved Greek-key design that rests above his ears and wraps around the back of his head. It's awesome. 

The flocking doesn't seem perfectly even all around, and you can see the circle created by the molding process at the top of his head through the flocking, but it's still clean and attractive. 

Unfortunately, the tie tags that were in his head stick out against the black flocking. They really weren't necessary. 

MGA has made something of a signature for themselves in their doll eyes, since many of their 11-inch and smaller fashion dolls have featured inset eyes or "glass" eyes (they're plastic), in contrast to dolls like Mattel's, whose eyes are printed onto the heads. Rainbow High and Shadow High dolls have inset eyes with applied lashes on top, making for a quite detailed and glamorous look. Overall, the heads of these dolls are large, round, and elegantly detailed to give them a fairly soft and beautiful tone, though Shadow High still has attitude to spare. 

Rexx's face has relaxed eyelids and a gentle smile that give him a friendly, knowing expression. His eyebrows are slightly darker than his skin, with lighter lines for hair texture. His eyes are light brown with some nice details to make them look fantastical but believable. The eyes don't have a significant follow-you effect at all, even though they do have some depth. 

Rexx's face is appealing, but I find him to look just a little too youthful--it's hard to see him as a teen and not a preadolescent with these head/body proportions working together. 

The girls in these doll lines have ear holes for earrings, but the boys have gotten them for wireless earbuds! Rexx, unfortunately, is missing one of his--and I checked my photos of him boxed-up to verify that it wasn't on me. While sealed in the package, you can see he only ever had the left earbud. Disappointing. 

I do like the pieces, though. They plug into the hole with a peg at the end of the rod and are sculpted to look believably fit into the ear.

RH/SH earrings are notably larger than those on Mattel dolls due to the head sizes being so different, but the earrings here have thicker and shorter pegs. While they're sturdy, I wish the pegs were longer, since, like the stand poles, the short length of plug-in space means the ear pieces can come out with less effort than they should. 

Okay. Are you ready to go nuts over an amazing piece of doll clothing??? Because oh my gosh, THIS COAT.

The showstopper of Rexx McQueen is, indisputably, his long puffy jacket. I was amazed by the photos, since this piece looked like a miniaturized human coat. I know MGA can do this kind of thing-- I'm reminded of Project Mc2 Bryden's puffy coat, or even RH Jade Hunter's, but still. It's great. 

Rexx's coat is black puffy fabric just like a typical real winter coat, but it's made fashion. The coat is hoodless and features a patch with studs on the left shoulder, and studs on the lower edge, which is split into four divergent panels that hang longer than most real puffy coats.

The zipper is convincing, but not functional.

The patch and a view of the studs and split lower edge.

The back edge of the coat.

As if the coat wasn't incredible enough, it's great when off, too.

Taking the coat off reveals a large tag which I cut off immediately, and a fully-lined interior, with the lining having a design of its own!

Do you know how much more you'd have to pay for any Mattel doll featuring a
piece crafted as well as this?!?

I'm just blown away. This piece is like a human coat made perfectly miniature. MGA is killing it with the clothes.

Before we talk about the rest, there's Rexx's necklace. It's a pearl choker with half of it being chain, and the necklace has a small gap between charms shaped like the letters "SH" that allows it to clip onto and pull off his neck.

It's nice to see a piece like this on a boy doll.

Under Rexx's coat, he has a hoodie with graphic text on it referencing a brand called the Anti-Social Social Club which I'd never heard of before. Wave 1 RH Jade also had clothing with a reference to the same.

The slogan says "I don't sparkle. I just have shade", in what almost seems like an oblique and decade-plus-too-late slam against Twilight's infamously ridiculed depiction of sparkling vampires in the sunlight. Is Rexx meant to be vampire-themed or is he just supposed to be moody and contrarian and this is about Rainbow High being sparkly? Jade was anti-sparkle too...even though both characters are from pretty sparkly brands.

I can understand the mentality of the slogan a little, but there's a big difference between loving yourself for what you are and loving yourself for what you're not (also, the best causes are for something rather than against them), and Rexx's hoodie feels a little "I'm not like other kids" to me. Maybe it'll pass and he just has some growing-up to do. We all do at some point, and it's certainly realistic for a teen to have this kind of attitude.

The hood and strings of Rexx's hoodie are decorative and non-functional. The hood just two strips of fabric that velcro together in the middle to form the silhouette of a hood, but they're too small to pull over his large head for even a suggestion of a hooded look.

The velcro in the middle is actually included so the whole hoodie can be opened all the way down the back.

On Invisi Billy, the hood had a hole but it was a closed loop, so you had to slide the hood section down his body after you undid the back and slid the sleeves off his arms.

Rexx's hoodie has full sleeves, which is a blessing and a headache. It's always theoretically nice to see dolls with full sleeves under coats since it's more realistic and offers better display for the doll sans coat...but the sleeves are typically omitted from under layers of doll costumes for a very practical reason--you're really gonna struggle to push the sleeves of the under layer through the sleeves of the over layer on a tiny doll. And for Rexx, I could not manage it. Putting his coat on meant his hoodie sleeves got comically scrunched-up and seriously hindered his elbow articulation. I like the coat (duh) so I had to cut the sleeves of the hoodie off to make Rexx's costume useable. Poor thinking, MGA. 

Fortunately, it doesn't look too bad sleeveless.

Under the hoodie, Rexx has a pair of black jeans...which I found to be surprisingly and comically high-waisted!

Um...

Pants up past most of the abs do not strike me as fashionable at all. Pants this high are a visual stereotype of very elderly men and a quintessential symbol of no style. The high length of the pants also means the hip pockets, which are open and functional, are completely covered by the hoodie and too high for his hands to comfortably reach. The pants do have other great details with belt loops and functional butt pockets. And look at those butt pockets' embroidery!

And here's a rear pocket holding one of  my Scarah's earrings to demonstrate they can hold very tiny things.

Just ignore the fact that the pants are right up to his scapulae-

Rexx has a pair of heavy black boots with tiny laces threaded through and tied into bows. I'm disappointed that these knots were not sealed with glue, since they can untie for real and are too small to reliably retie, in my mind.

The toes have more SH letters.

The boots pull off the feet well enough without untying, though it's a good pull to do so. A common theme we'll see in RH and SH is shoes that are pretty darn tricky, either through force or construction, to take off and put on the dolls.

Rexx has fewer clothing pieces than Shanelle--not because he's a boy doll, but because the second wave of Shadow High came after MGA decided to cut the second outfits from the RH/SH dolls and fill the void with accessories. I've heard two potential explanations for this move-- either MGA cut the second outfits to combat price inflation because just one outfit (done with perhaps a bit more spectacle) would allow the dolls to be sold for the same price as earlier releases with two, or because MGA did market research that found kids were responding more to play accessories than second costumes. It's possible both are actually true--kids liked accessories, and they were cheaper to produce than second outfits, so MGA swapped out the clothes for accessories to keep prices the same and cater to test audiences. I love a good multi-wardrobe doll here at TT&T,  and have lots of fun designing dolls with multiple costumes, but I can understand the cut in these dolls, and I think dolls like Rexx and Zooey offer a compelling compromise and still feature decent display options by having absolutely epic yet optional over-layers of clothing--I mean, these jackets are just incredible pieces of doll clothes. As we'll see, I also found the secondary outfits on dolls that had them to be largely unexciting, with the base elements of those outfits not being what I chose to display the dolls in.

Let's look at the body. 

The boys in these doll lines have fairly cartoonish muscled torsos which I don't find to match the comparative realism of the heads, and they have painted underwear on their torsos and legs to look like they're wearing boxer shorts. Rexx's are silver. 

The RH/SH bodies are well-articulated, with rotating hinges at the limbs, and double-jointed knees. This articulation scheme is similar to the Liv doll brand that was concurrent to early Monster High, with a couple of tradeoffs. RH/SH features a rotation joint in the upper leg to compensate for the non-rotating knee, which is a feature seen on Mattel dolls with double-jointed limbs since the Frightfully Tall Monster High dolls and on to Made to Move Barbie, and is also common on many action figures. Conversely, Liv's main dolls had no leg rotation but featured a joint at the waist that let them rotate and tip their torso, a feature I would have expected RH/SH to have. Torso joints of some kind just kind of feel like they'd be on these dolls, right? But it's fine that they're not.

Here's how Rexx poses.

The heads rotate in a full circle and tip a little bit from side to side, but not really at all forward and back.

The upper arms bend to a straight angle parallel to the collarbone, and the elbow bend to 90 degrees. When the elbow is fully bent out, the arm is still slightly curved due to the way the pieces are sculpted.

The arm part that inserts into the upper arm is quite thick, and not designed as a removable peg.

Rexx's hands rotate in a full circle, but I was finding the hinges to not be very effective. I was able to remove both hands, which attach with short pegs similar to Monster High dolls. We'll later see on the girls that this is not the same as them, since the girls have dramatically longer left hand pegs than right hand pegs. When put back in, the articulation didn't really change for Rexx's hands--either the wrist part of the hand or the joint peg itself is too short, or the wrist part of the arm is too tall, preventing the hand's hinge from bending to 90 degrees like the girls' can. When you try to bend the hinge more, you can feel the wrist peg being stressed and pulled against its socket in the arm, so it's clear the peg is being pulled too hard against the moving part of the hand, without enough distance for the hand to hinge properly. I imagine if I had the proficient advanced machinery to slice a clean millimeter or so off the end of his wrists, it'd do wonders. 

This was about as far forward as Rexx's hand would bend.

Rexx's hands have painted black nail polish, which, like the necklace, is nice to see on a stylish guy. 

Rexx's legs have rotating hinges at the hips, which also include cups of some kind that the hip parts move alongside, perhaps to aid motion or fill gaps in the body when they move. The hips can hinge forward well enough for Rexx to sit leaned back on the ground.

Not the most natural sit.

These hip joints can also be rotated and spread apart to make the doll do full side splits!

The double-hinged kees make for a good kneel on both. I find kneeling them to be a very appealing and practical option for putting these dolls down and off to the side when working on them for something. It takes up less space and balances much easier than sitting them with their legs in front.

He's leaning back because he can, not because he must--his torso could be 
leaned forward more. 

Kneeling on one knee is more impractical.

The legs can be rotated at those seams at the top, and the feet have rotating hinges like other boy dolls', and which the RH/SH girls lack. Overall, the boys have fair articulation, but I was very disappointed by the wrist hinges, at least on this specific doll copy. Maybe other boys or other Rexxes don't have this issue. 

Here's Rexx next to a G3 MH boy doll, representing a close competing analogue on the current doll market.

Rainbow High and Shadow High dolls have more congruent male and female body sizes and proportions than I've seen from any other fashion doll brand, but the differences between external brands and RH/SH are stark. Despite the differences between Rexx and Deuce, Deuce wears Rexx's clothes pretty well.

Here's Rexx dressed back up with all of his accessories.

Overall, Rexx is pretty incredible. I can't be effusive enough about that coat, and his visual design is really fun. He's got some pretty irksome flaws, though. My copy of Rexx came missing an earbud, which is annoying, and I found the sleeves of the hoodie impossible to negotiate with the coat, so I had to cut the hoodie sleeves off. As with any doll who has flocking on the back of their head, the manufacturers had absolutely no business putting tie tags into it for packaging. I also didn't understand the goofy high-waisting of his pants. Not very stylish to me. The lacing of his shoes also bothered me just because they can come untied and it's unreasonably tricky to redo a bow at that scale. Those knots should have been glued. And finally, the wrist articulation felt inexcusably inferior to other fashion dolls', including the ladies of this very doll line.

Now let's look at Shanelle.

Her box is in the more classic RH style, before the move to rectangular packages. While the presentation is spectacular, it's not unreasonable to call it over-engineered and wasteful. MGA has long shown little concern about wasting space and plastic in their many doll brands' packaging, and that's never good. The first SH dolls had mirrored boxes to RH's, so the dolls and second outfit were on the opposite sides to RH. Even with the new box design, this persists, though it's swapped--RH has accessories packaged on the left while SH has them on the right. 

The box is very holographic. The lower edge features artwork of the six wave 1 characters going from black to white, and Natasha wraps around the rounded edge. 

The back of the box has a group artwork of the kids in the school setting, and a brief blurb in many languages about SH's concept as a rival school.

Shanelle's seal on the side of the box is holographic and identifies her specialty as couture design.

The tops of these boxes have plastic carry handles. 

These boxes open in a way vaguely similar to MGA's Novi Stars, what with the way they use a curved plastic window for a rounded shape. Slicing tape allows you to basically unfold and then unroll the box to expose the packet containing the doll stand in the back, and then to remove the two separate cardboard inserts containing the doll and the second outfit. Both inserts are loose inside the outer box and come out very easily.

Here's the two inserts out of the box.

Shanelle is attached to her insert in the typical ways. Her box used plastic "handcuffs" to keep her arms in pose--tabs of plastic that encircle her wrist and are attached somewhere to the backdrop. Few of the SH dolls I bought had these cuffs involved. The other dolls either had tags in their sleeves attached to the body of their outfits or rubber bands or tie tags doing the job. 

The outfit insert includes two separate window-box packages attached to the back, and they easily come off. The packages have perforation tabs to make them easier to open, and inside, the pieces are held in with tie tags, with the top and skirt being attached to a thin plastic body form. The presentation of these clothing pieces is nice, and reminiscent of the surprise-clothing packaging MGA has done on dolls with surprise gimmicks. RH/SH are unusual among their modern fare for not having blind-packaging elements in their dolls (they still sell blind-packed shoes and handbags in small boxes), but they evidently picked up some tricks for boxing up stuff from their work in surprise toys.

Here's Shanelle fully deboxed with all of her stock. 

As mentioned, she represents pure black on the Wave 1 spectrum, but she also represents the spectrum in its entirety with the hair and dress colors including the precise core tones of the other wave 1 characters!

 Her stand is slightly darker and less sparkly than Rexx's.

From promotional material, Shanelle Onyx frankly sounds like an unpleasant person. She's described as a bit of a diva with an "I'm a gift to the world" mentality forming her motivation to push into a career of high prestige. On the one hand, she's gorgeous and has impeccable style, so her ego comes from a strong place...but on the other hand, absolutely no gift to the world would claim, nor even think, they are one.

Shanelle's name is an alternate spelling of "Chanel" with, perhaps, "Shadow" squeezed in. I've seen complaints about the name Chanel not being worth upholding as a connotation of style and glamor because Coco Chanel is becoming a little more widely-recognized for her work as a Nazi collaborator,  but the legacy of her name is simply not for me to decide and I can't get angry at MGA for using a connotation that's endured as harmless for most of the world. Sure, maybe the name should be de-lionized...but it's not reasonable to get annoyed about Shan Onyx in a world where invocation of Coco Chanel's name simply is not yet seen as wrong or suspect by the majority of people.

Shanelle's hair is very long, sleek, unparted, and straight, and tied up in a high ponytail with a fabric elastic hair tie with an attached bow and plastic jewel being wrapped over the plastic elastic tying the ponytail into place.

The hair is mostly black, but on the left side of her head, Shanelle has streaks of grey surrounding a white streak to provide some contrast. The hair includes one less shade of grey than her dress.

Natasha, Luna, and Shanelle are clearly matched to the white, dark grey, and
 black, but the lighter grey tone could represent any or all of the three lighter
grey kids.

Shanelle also has sculpted baby hairs on her forehead, a feature of several RH/SH dolls, which are here painted to match the color so the hairs under the white streak are also white. Styled baby hairs have become more visible and trendy and are predominantly associated with Black and Latina women as a cultural and political statement about hair and beauty. Baby hairs have been debated about as to whether White people are okay to embrace and style them, given their association with Black and Latin culture and the way that styling is often unfairly discriminated against on non-White wearers. There are some RH/SH dolls with pretty pale skin that have sculpted baby hairs, so that makes me wonder if they're meant to be POC or not--they certainly could be. There's no ambiguity with some characters, who seem to lack baby hairs due to being heavily White-coded. For instance, Natasha Zima, who literally couldn't be whiter due to being natively Dutch, pale as snow all over, and having a fully Eastern European name including a surname that means "winter". Characters like her make me feel like MGA is showing some care and avoiding giving baby hairs to White characters, which would mean the pale characters who do have them have non-White heritage that a first glance may not suggest in a fantastically-colored brand like this. Glitch, for example, seems to be Latina, since she has baby hairs and her real name is Reina. Outside of MGA, I've also seen baby hairs depicted on dolls to mixed effect. Like, in Monster High, with the half-Asian half-White G3 Draculaura's Creepover Party doll, it feels a little weirder to me seeing baby hairs than it does when used on Afro-Latina G3 Clawdeen. But again, it's not for me to say.

Shanelle's hair feels very nice, but it might not feel tight enough inside its hair ties. It feels like it might be too sleek, perhaps, to stay tightened down by the elastic, or perhaps the bands they gave her could have been longer so they tightened around one or two more times. 

Shanelle also had some nonsensical and frustrating application of hair gel, with thick product sprayed purposelessly into the bottom of her ponytail. This gel was very resistant to washing (the hair can wash out and then dry right back to solid on these dolls if you aren't thorough and willing to wash multiple times with hot water) and at the end, it felt like some of her white hair had been fried somehow, so I trimmed off a little bit of her ponytail. No harm done, especially since her hair was heavy enough to throw her head out-of-pose. 

The hair, minus kinks from the packaging tie tags, and trimmed
 a little.

Shanelle's face is quite pretty, with faintly purple/blue eyes outlined in white and having grey eyeshadow over the top. Her lips are a metallic purple in a very dark shade. The female dolls in this brand all have slightly relaxed lips showing a strip of teeth between them in an effect similar to many Bratz dolls or perhaps Jessica Rabbit--it's kind of a shorthand for glamor at this point. 

I didn't mention it with Rexx, but I do appreciate how all of the face sculpts in these two brands feature substantial noses. While the eyes are huge and the lips are small, the noses aren't unrealistically tiny or flat buttons, which gives the fairly flat profiles some more feature and contour than large-headed dolls usually get. The sculpts of Monster High feel much more human compared to the squished and rounded RH/SH heads, but these definitely could have looked more infantile and overcaricatured. I can definitely see how these sculpts were made for teenaged characters, but the head/body proportions fight against that for me.

Shanelle's earrings are identical to each other and have greyish plastic jewels at both ends. 

Shanelle's first outfit is an amazing ruffled dress. It's made to look strapless, but does in fact have clear elastic shoulder straps, and has a black sweetheart bodice and a very ruffled flouncy shirt with colors that gradate through a scale that matches decently well to the wave 1 cast, having five tones to the dolls' six. This correspondence was something I actually realized when I got one of the dolls you'll be seeing in the next post!

The dress contains one more shade than the hair, but doesn't 
include a color for each character. The lightest grey ruffles
are close to both Heather and Ash, so they both get
 represented by that tone, I guess.

Around her waist, Shanelle has a black ribbon belt with a black SH buckle. The ribbon has velcro at the ends to let it be removed from the outfit.

It's actually pretty surprising to me that this is the only place Shanelle has the SH letters anywhere on her clothing. Because you might have already noticed the dolls are lousy with them. 

I get that these dolls are based on fashion academies and designer clothing from the real world where brands and logos are status symbols, but the tiresomely self-referential use of the Shadow High brand name for clothing flavor grates on me. It feels like a missed opportunity to make the dolls have more character-specific symbols and patterns, and the words and initials of the brand and school feel like they waste space on these characters. Monster High uses its Skullette logo on a lot of dolls, but that worked for me because 1. the Skullette is purely graphical, not text, and 2. the characters also had fully-fledged visual symbols to set them apart. In SH, the initials and words of the brand name feel like an uncreative visual crutch and an insecure intrusion of shallow brand association. They remind me of the most hollow and repellent aspects of modern fashion, where the logo and the high cost are what makes the clothes sell. The SH logos are also sometimes the most concrete visual symbol a doll has, and they're a dull one at that. I don't know. School spirit is fine, but the dolls need to branch the symbols out past the brand name more. MGA can implement strong visual motifs-- Shanelle has jewels, Zooey has graphic patches and electrical parts, Monique has flowers and mythical serpents, etc., so the proliferation of text referencing the dolls' own brand name really isn't needed. 

I just don't think anyone needs dolls that reinforce designer- and brand-based fashion culture. But oh, well. If I want fully individualistic non-consumerist fashion senses, I always have Monster High. And maybe Shanelle's low amount of branding is reflective of her focus as a couture designer.

The skirt of Shanelle's dress has two layers, each with an ombre effect on them. The layer the ruffles are attached to has a soft grey ombre that can be seen between the ruffles to keep the gradient working through the gaps, and the underskirt layer giving the shape structure also has an ombre inside--seemingly just for that much more polish!

The two ombre'd layers of underskirt.

Shanelle has one piece of separate jewelry beside her earring-- a thin silver band around her wrist.

You can also see the Shadow High female hand sculpt, which has some pretty wicked nails that are genuinely pretty pokey and sharp, and make the hands capable of catching on some clothing. Removing them during redressing is a little  more useful with these clawed dolls than it would be for the softer-handed RH girls. Shanelle's nails are silver. 

The detail on the other side of the hands is pretty good!

Shanelle's first outfit has strapped sandals with bot detail and furry toes over frilly black lace socks. 

Taking off these shoes is not easy, nor is putting them on. Getting them off and on the toes is alright, but the strap loop has no gap at the back, meaning you're really pulling and wrenching the loops over her heels to get them on and off, and it feels like a risk for damaging the shoes. Unfortunately, both of Shan's shoe options are strapped sandals. I think cutting notches in the back of the straps to let them slide more easily over the heel, the way Mattel does their shoes, would make a difference.

Here are the pieces off so you can see the socks better. These are her only pair of socks, so it's up to you whether you include them with both outfits, just one of them, or neither.

Shanelle's second outfit consists of a puffy-sleeved leather jacket, a beaded tank top and a silver houndstooth skirt, and an alternate pair of shoes.

Using the hangers from Rexx to demonstrate.

Here she is redressed without the jacket and socks first. 

RH/SH clothing pieces seem to fit very tightly as a rule, which means it can be a little challenging to put them on, but the pieces are worth it and do fit.

Shanelle's top is similarly sweetheart-shaped, but is covered in glued silver beads and white pearls. It doesn't feel too contoured to her bust, but it doesn't look bad. The skirt has nice faux-leather trim and stud "buttons" with a silvery houndstooth pattern for the body.

This skirt has a white strip of fabric that fits between her legs when the skirt is on, preventing the skirt from riding up too high and helping keep it aligned.

The second pair of shoes is my favored pair since the jewels on the toe straps match her earrings, and I didn't like the weird fur element of the first pair. These photos are taken after redressing her with her socks.

Shanelle's leather jacket is well-constructed and features studs, a simulated zipper, and frilly puff sleeves of translucent smooth black fabric. It's not a scratchy sheer material.

Again, my camera is turning black to purple here. It's extra confusing
given how Shanelle actually mixes the two, but no--the sleeves are black!

Here's Shanelle trying to channel her creepy side in the second outfit. 

Now let's look at the body. 

The RH/SH girls have stocky bodies with wide hips. Their underwear is not painted like boxers, and Shanelle's color is the same silver as Rexx's and her nail polish. 

Articulation-wise, the bodies of the boys and girls are very similar. The wrist joints on the girls are better but the feet are static. Here's some photos exploring what they can do-- just know these aren't things, save for what I just mentioned, that Rexx would differ on.

\

Here's a better picture of the inner-hip joint cups these dolls have.

And here's how the hand pegs of these girls look--left with a much longer peg than right, which is something I've seen on all of them so far. It looks like an error given how the bumps to pop them in are at the same level, almost like the pegs aren't being properly trimmed on the left hands, but these hands have been consistently like this on the SH girl dolls I've looked at and they fit into the arms like this, so I assume this is deliberate, and perhaps a way for the machines to more easily identify the side each hand is for?

And now a size comparison-- Monster High, Shadow High, and the China Girl doll. 

Monster High and Shadow High are the same height, but with very different proportions. SH is larger all around, and there won't be any clothes-sharing with G1. I bet G3 Draculaura's wide hips make her clothing more compatible with RH/SH. The China Girl dwarfs SH, though. I had not realized she was my largest doll. If I can get a Gooliope again, she won't be!

Here's Shanelle redressed how I think she looks best--gradient dress, socks, jewel shoes, and leather jacket. This is the look that makes her feel more complete and deluxe, like a modern, edgy spin on a classic antique doll. 

I think Shanelle turned out to be a really nice doll. She had no evident manufacturing errors or defects I could see, and my troubles with her were minor-- she had damaged hair with needless gel, but only at the very bottom, and her shoes' straps did not feel hardy enough to stand up to the aggressive force they need to slip on and off her heels multiple times during redressing play. I think Shanelle is a gorgeous, well-executed and extremely striking doll. 

Of these two, Shanelle was definitely the more satisfying experience, while Rexx had several problems, but I think both are very strong toys nonetheless. 

Since there's so little difference between color and black-and-white photos of these two dolls, I needed to grab some more saturated characters to show off the impact of these dolls!

Pre-makeover Avea and Tinny flanking the dark SH kids.

It's a fun effect.

In the next part of this review, we explore more shadows...but with more saturation, too.