What's Weirder than Weird Barbie?: Defa Lucy & Misil Masker Masquerade Dolls from Temu

In my last post, I reviewed Weird Barbie. You haven't seen anything yet.

I found this popped up in a Google promoted result, and I was intrigued--it was a cheap Chinese doll with transforming monster features that took it from a generic magical Barbie type to a more cartoonish and far more bizarre monster with different limbs to swap out and three masks each that clipped on. These dolls looked so strange and cheap that they transcended into surrealism in a way I couldn't pass up. I love weird toys.

Unlike other Chinese doll lines, these dolls seem to only be available on Temu, which is a capitalistic casino hellscape tempting you with everything too good to be true, and despite all of my glaring hypocrisy in saying so, I truly cannot recommend avoiding the platform and its manipulative tactics enough. 

I confess to being hypnotized for the good part of an hour trying to get one of Temu's fabled free gift deals so I might wangle some credit to get one of these dolls that way, but I quickly realized the pitfalls--in order to claim something free, you have to choose multiple "free" gifts, and mysterious odds always somehow land in your favor to land you some bonus extra gifts on top...which means you're forced to choose more items than you actually wanted at the start. Free or not, that's not actually a good deal. Mobile-game gambling pop-ups give you arbitrary bonuses that allow you to incrementally "unlock" the items in the pool you've selected, but it always turns out you're short of the credit needed to bag your loot...unless, perhaps, you'd be willing to share a link? And they'll ask you every way under the sun with fiftyish different pop-ups saying as much until you relent or quit. Ain't nothing free in truth.(Hint-hint: none of the "unlock your gifts" prelude meant a damn thing functionally; it's all empty theatre to hype your brain until the punchline of "recruit new buyers!" lands. That's the only actual criterion to "winning".) 

I say with some amount of pride that I just quit. I consider serving any kind of promotion for a company in casual interactions to be extremely opportunistic and poor social etiquette, so I wasn't willing to impose like that. It wasn't worth pestering somebody I knew, even if prefaced with a self-aware warning that what I was about to do was BS, to get a free cheap toy and other flotsam I never wanted to begin with. It's also ethically horrible to rope someone else into a predatory addictive scam for your own gains. 

So I snapped out of the brain fog and realized I could just wait and buy the damn weirdo dolls legitimately. It scared me a little how vulnerable I had been to that shiny impossible promise, but it felt very self-affirming that I pulled back and recognized what was being done to me in time. I am not immune, and I'm weaker than I ought to be when I feel a lull in projects, but I have resistance!

These "Masker Masquerade" dolls are Barbie-ish fantasy characters with strange extra parts. Their limbs come off below the hip and shoulder to be traded out for monstrous pieces, and there are three unique mask clip-ons per doll which promise to change the face into a cartoony visage. I'm reminded of both Monster High and Winx dolls (the latter of which I'm admittedly very unfamiliar with) with these mask faces. 

The dolls come in three styles. While all are nearly identical white blonde women with bangs, the dresses, hair accents, and add-ons are different. There's a blue-dressed doll with blue and purple skeleton limbs, a pink-dressed doll with white skeleton limbs, and a green-dressed doll with wooden-style tree limbs! While I liked all three and found virtue in each, I ultimately decided to get the pink and green dolls. The pink feels more like a warped classic Barbie and her white bones are more classically spooky. Her arms are also hilariously mismatched in size in a way that adds to the camp bizarreness of it all. The blue doll feels a bit more mystical and fantasy in a way that's more similar to the green doll. I had to get the green doll because her transformation sculpts are unique, and they're fascinating. We like tree people on this blog.

The boxes arrived squished on the sides and one of the green doll's masks had fallen off into the bottom of the box.

The packaging is pretty generic and utilitarian--very "dollar-store doll". These dolls aren't a bigger IP, so there's not much storytelling going on here and the artwork could very well be stolen or else stock in nature. I'm also not sure if the "3+" age rating might be too generous. I'd probably raise that to at least 5+ myself. The "Masker Masquerade" name is a little clunky, and I'd wager, entirely inaccurate, because even if the clip-on faces are truly just masks, there's no way those limb transformations are happening without actual magic. It almost makes you wonder which is masquerading as which? I'd buy it more if it was the monsters disguising themselves as the pretty human ladies!

The top of the box brands these dolls as a subrelease of Defa Lucy and Misil. I'm roughly familiar with the former brand name (searching for Defa Lucy dolls was what alerted me to these ones). Defa Lucy has sprung up as a Chinese mimic of Barbie in recent years and has gotten a following, but the Misil name only turned up Defa Lucy dolls when I searched it, so maybe it's some kind of brand partner that's not always involved or something? Misil doesn't appear to be its own doll line or solo brand. The name "Defa Lucy" is confusing, but it appears to be short for "Default Lucy", which doesn't carry over to native English vernacular very well."Default" connotes "unaltered", "generic", "placeholder", and "bland". I can only assume the name was meant to mean something like "Everygirl Lucy" to suggest the doll is adaptable and can fill any role as an iconic character the way Barbie does.

Defa Lucy...Defaulcy. Huh. I guess even her normal name ties into the "default" angle. 

The back of the box has some translated text describing the three dolls, which doesn't feel entertainingly wonky, but still phrases things in ways you wouldn't see from native English copy. I do appreciate the witch graphic, original or not, since if these dolls are witches, they're extremely out-there for the concept! I always like abstractions and far reaches of the witch concept, much as the classic archetype appeals to me.

The blue doll is described as "Spider", though her only spider imagery is one of her masks. The pink doll is "Skull", though "Skeleton" would be more accurate. It is always intriguing and charming, though, whenever a skeletal being is referred to as just a "skull", though. It makes things weirder! The green doll is called "Ents", which is incorrectly plural and refers to the Ent race of tree-giants created by J.R.R. Tolkien in his Middle-earth lore. She'd have to just be called a "tree" in native English branding to distance herself from Tolkien. The green doll's tree limbs are green in the box photos, but the produced doll has brown branches, which looks more proper.

The doll's transformation is described as "conversion of angels and demons", which would probably have to be written "transforms from good to evil" in native English copy since "angel" and "demon" are largely religious words in Western culture, and moreso when paired together. You could maybe get away with calling the monster transformation a "demon" if the pretty mode wasn't "angel", but even that could be difficult to pass. Alternatively, if we had to choose noun archetypes, maybe "transforms from princess to witch" or "transforms from fairy to monster" (or "fairy to witch" or "princess to monster").

Here's the box side.

The doll unboxes pretty easily. The backdrop slides out and there weren't too many plastic tags to deal with. There was no unpleasant chemical smell from any of the plastic. Here's the assortment.

The main doll is dressed up in a slightly edgy pink dress, but otherwise looks generically friendly. 

Her hair is blonde with red streaks. The bangs are ungelled and lay well, but the rest of the hair is thinly rooted and doesn't feel the nicest. It doesn't blend out super naturally when combed, and a lot of fiber pulled out in the process. 

The hair is softer to the touch than many Living Dead Dolls', but it's still clearly cheap.

The face might be a typical Defa Lucy sculpt, but the paint doesn't feel much like other Defa Lucy dolls and certainly isn't like Barbie. The face is grinning and long with a round nose and cheeks, and paired with her heavy eyeshadow, she looks like she's out of her twenties and isn't as stereotypically gorgeous as you'd expect for a fashion doll. These aren't criticisms or problems. She looks lovely and reminds me of people I like. Her side profile looks a bit more youthful, but her eyelids and makeup are still pretty heavy.

And next to Weird Barbie to see the differences. Nevermind the "defaced" paint on Barbie. You can still see the differences pretty clearly.

The doll's dress is one piece. It features a spooky vampiric halter-strap black collar and the rest is a vivid coral pink with a white-trimmed sweetheart neckline, off-the shoulder net sleeves, a puffy skirt with black lace trim, and a tulle train below the skirt. The dress also features glitter specks in the netting that sheds like it does on any doll with glitter specks in the netting. Nicer dolls have been just as guilty on that point, so that's not really a mark against her quality. 

Abolish glitter. 

The skirt velcros in back, but the collar does not open, making it much trickier to slide the dress off her body. I exploited her removable lower arms to slide the sleeves off more easily, and opted to slide the collar down her body to remove the dress.

The blue doll's dress, pictured above, is very very similar in construction to the red doll's. All of the shaping is subtly different, but the structure is the same.

Under the dress, she has stiff black net footie tights and black witchy boots. Both of these pieces might be cheap, but they feel nice, and for a doll without extensive leg articulation, the stiff net isn't a problem.

Here's the body next to modern (Made to Move) Barbie.

Ignore the mangled glued-on tights.

The Masquerade doll is definitely similar, but her proportions seem based on a Barbie from an era before the current one, with a more pinched waist and top-heavy bust. 

The Masquerade doll has more of a butt, while the Barbie is more modest. The weirdest aspect of the Masquerade sculpt is the vertical indented line on the belly, almost like the navel has been stretched. 

It doesn't read as abdominal muscle, either. This feels so conspicuous that I might guess it was a deliberate alteration of a sculpt that was mostly plagiarized, done to make the shape technically distinct. "Copy your answers but change a few words" and all. Can't say for sure, though. 

Weird Barbie wears the Masquerade dress okay, but the black strap detached on one side in the process and I had to reglue it after because the sewing or fabric were weak.

Weird Barbie's dress would be tighter on the Masquerade doll because her torso is bigger than Barbie's.

The doll's head rotates and tips a little bit side-to-side and forward and back, but not as well as most Mattel dolls.

The shoulders are rotating hinges, and the detachable lower arms can rotate within their sockets. The shoulder joints aren't super strong but aren't falling down loose.

The elbows of the lower arms are molded bent and have no internal clicks. They're soft vinyl, as are the shoulder parts. Arms with simple articulation like this are better than Barbie Fashionistas are afforded, so that's something. The stiff-armed dolls are one thing, but the bent-armed dolls are awful because the sculpted pose never looks good when you move the shoulder swivel. Don't get me started.

The legs are on ball joints. They split front-to-back fine, but don't hinge outward very far.

The knees have internal click joints, but I could only get them to bend to one position, and it's essentially useless due to how little it changes the shape.

Straight leg above, bent leg below.

And the removable pieces. The arms pop out of the upper arm piece, and oddly, the pegs are hinges. Hinges here makes no sense for that point on the arm, and neither can the hinges even be bent because the arm segments pop together flush in their socket.

The hinge peg doesn't even make sense if you tried to take this lower arm as the full arm recycled from another doll. This wouldn't be able to pop into a doll and look correct or function as its own complete arm. 

The only other doll I have with attached shoulders and removable lower arms is Gooliope Jellington, whose arms separate by the shoulder instead of the elbow due to her double joints. I don't think her removable arms were strictly necessary when her hands could pop out, but it was there.

I assume this arm system would have been the same for the other 17-inch Monster High dolls and perhaps the one 17-inch Ever After High doll too.

The Masker Masquerade hips pop onto ball pegs which are formed of split prongs. This system feels very much like the hip attachment of Create-a-Monster Monster High dolls, but the static ball joint of the Masquerade legs is less complex than the CAM rotating hip hinges, as are the one-piece full legs less complex than the two-part CAM legs.

Here's the grisly replacements!

The monster arms are white bare bones, and one of them is much larger and longer than the other, to a ridiculous effect which I was very charmed by. The blue doll also has skeleton limbs, colored purple and turquoise, but her arms are more even in length, which is less fun. I believe the shorter arm is the same shape on the blue doll.

These arms also have hinge pegs at the end, and the hands are also on rotating hinges (those can pop out safely), making these arms more articulated than the "normal" ones! The wrist sockets aren't cut with the best allowances for motion, but the hands can bend back and forth a little and spin around.

The legs are white bones too, with big feet and some extra texture on the legs, including leg ribs of some sort and a small skull seemingly growing out of one knee--so this is not just an ordinary fleshless skeleton, it's some aberrant creature made of bones that grow differently! Very surreal and cool!

These two leg sculpts seem to be shared exactly by the blue doll.

The feet here are also rotating hinges, but the knees are static.

Here's the nude body with the bone limbs.

This is so strange; I love it. Definitely getting a bit of a "Toy Story Sid's mutant toys" feeling here.

The arms are soft plastic. Because of this, the big arm tends to sag under its own weight, which is also enough to threaten to lower the shoulder joint through gravity. The big skeleton feet are theoretically great for stability, but the doll fell over several times. The right leg is also much tighter on the hip than the human right leg was, so the leg kind of snaps forward and back and jumps on the joint when you pose it. This is likely variable from copy to copy.

While the bone legs looked huge, I was surprised to find they're shorter than the standard legs and make the doll shorter than Barbie!

I was also surprised to find the knee skull is a separate piece that pops out on a peg.

More creatures should have knee skulls as part of their anatomy.

Now, the masks. These are all the same sculpt and have knob projections on the side that look a little fake. I don't know if they're meant to evoke ears, but they look like pegs. Here's the first mask--a white face with tree branches under the eyes and vampire teeth.

This hugely transforms the character's vibe. The cartoony look and evil face makes her look like a mischievous gremlin and the color-match to the bones creates an appealing cohesion. 

The masks are all pretty glossy and they simply press on over the face with no mechanism or connection points--just a tight fit...ideally. I was worried the masks wouldn't fit under the bangs properly, but they do...just not all of the masks were molded tight enough to cling to the face.

The second mask is a green face with branches coming out of the top of the eye, which might suit the green doll very well (even better if her tree limbs were green like the box photos, but I like the final brown). Problem was, it's too loose (the back of the mask molded too wide and open) to stay on the doll's head. 

That blur is the mask falling off.

I had to give up and lie her down to show you what the mask looked like.

This piece also has some blemishes.

The last mask is more naturally-colored, if not matched to the doll, and has a grinning look and abstract makeup.

This does nothing for me, but this face is where I'm getting slight Winx energy. With maybe a microgram of Equestria Girls.

The mask mechanic reminds me a lot of the clip-on faceplates of the Monster High Inner Monster dolls spinning off from the Create-a-Monster line. I still need to make a project of the Feisty/Love doll because she's been so important to me and my doll history, but she's in such bad condition that I'd want to replace some of her body parts for the best showcase.

I wasn't sure what to call the pink doll for the longest time, but once I put her monster pieces together with the white mask, the answer was obvious to me. She's a screwed-up skeleton witch in the skin of a Barbie doll...so she's Barbie Yaga! The Slavic fairy-tale witch was often called "bony-legs" and could be depicted as literally half-skeletal, so it was a good match. 

We'll get back to Barbie Yaga all dressed up later because she was fully completed with one of the green doll's masks. 

Here's that doll. 

Unlike the pink doll, I knew what to call this one from the moment I saw her. Classicists will know there's only one appropriate name for a woman turning into a tree--Daphne.

Daphne's hair is like Barbie Yaga's, but with green streaks instead of red, and their faces are just the same.

Over her dress, she wears a teal tulle cape with a green ribbon tie and a fabric round collar matching the material of the halter strap on the pink dress. I'd have liked if this cape closed with velcro rather than a ribbon. That would be more user-friendly and conducive to consistent attractive display.

Her dress shape is unique among the three dolls, with a strapless gold-trimmed bodice with tulle triangular strips hanging down, and a jagged-cut skirt. Gold glitter decorates the dress, and it shed all over my hands.

She has the same boots as the other doll, but no socks or stockings.

I noticed her hip pegs are the same color as her body, unlike the pink doll's. 

This is encouraging, since, as discussed with the disaster and repair saga of Living Dead Dolls Chloe, translucent plastics are poor for doll joints and the opaque material here is likely to be sturdier and create less sticky friction. I think part of the problem with the bone leg being so tight on the other doll comes from the translucent white pegs.

The tree limbs are very cool sculpts. Like the bone arms, the hands are on rotating hinges with limited range. The arms are dark beige with swirling branches and woodgrain, and the left arm has a humanoid hand, while the right arm's hand has been fully diffused into a flat tangle of branches.

Unfortunately, there's a black spot on this arm's "hand".

I'd have loved if the branches weren't so planar and split into multiple axes and took up more 3D space, but that'd make them way harder to cast and extract from a mold. 

The legs are both shaped like twisted trunks, with one leg's "foot" being larger. The "feet" are sculpted as bundles of cut tree branches with spiral "rings".

These are really cool sculpts, and they work well to turn two legs into the lower part of a tree person. Unfortunately, the surfaces of the "soles" aren't level, so it's a bit of a balance to stand the doll on these legs.

Of course I was reminded of Treesa Thornwillow with these sculpts, and I had to put the dolls together.

Doesn't the green doll look like the story of mythological Daphne this way?

The arm branches are stylized in such a similar way between the two, and it might be possible that Treesa's sculpts were downsized and modified for Daphne and that a little bit of copying took place. The Masquerade doll's left-hand fan of branches looks a lot like the branches framing Treesa's right hand. I don't know for sure.

The masks from this doll have the same three face colors and paint patterns as the first doll, just in different combinations of colors.

I'd tried and failed to wipe the paint off the top middle mask before this photo, but you saw it untouched earlier.

The blue doll has two unique paint designs on her white and green masks, but her flesh-colored mask has the same paint design as the abstract makeup on both of the other dolls' assortments, and thus also appears to be the exact same mask design as the red doll's (top middle in the above photo).

Here's the white mask--this one has the upper eye branches.

And the green mask--the abstract makeup.

And the flesh mask--vampiric.

All of Daphne's masks fit her, but none of them really suit her. The best mask of the six would be the green one with the branch makeup, but that doesn't fit on Daphne's head any better than it did on Barbie Yaga's.

Speaking of, Barbie Yaga took the white mask with the branch makeup to suit the Baba Yaga forest-witch idea better than the vampiric white mask did. I love this freak weirdo. Gosh, what a fun toy.

Barbie Yaga Bony-Legs. (The train of her skirt works so well!)

I feel like if this character was in the Barbie movie 'verse, this could either be a real Barbie turned into a Sid-style mutant toy, with a face glued onto her head that reshaped her personality, or else she could be fully literal and not even a Barbie, reviled as a scary witch on the basis of being a dreaded off-brand. 

Her one arm is long that it gets out of focus when raised from the front!

I've reviewed skeleton doll sculpts before with Monster High Jack Skellington here, and Skelita Calaveras starting here, but I only have my Skelita dolls anymore today. I don't think Skelita was all too happy to see this creature.

"That is not a skeleton!!!"

Back to Daphne. I decided to make her over a little. I got her bald, and used some LEGO foliage to poke branches into her head, but they're not glued in because I want those pieces able to be reused if needed, and might opt to replace them with Playmobil branches that are more in-style and the same color as the arm sculpts at a later date. I also trimmed down her shoulder pieces to give the arms room to use their hinge pegs a little. It suited her tree poses better.

I then painted the flesh-toned mask that fit Daphne to create a spooky tree face for her. I'm happy with the design I came up with. It makes her feel more like folk art or a stop-motion puppet, and makes her look like a ritual doll crafted from branches. 

Not the kind of tree you want to climb.

"...oops."

And I can pop her into my green-streaked Barbie Color Reveal wig to bring her back to the image of the early transformation akin to the mythical Daphne.

She looks like a 1980s doll now.

Not stunning, but serviceable.

Here she is outside.

And playing with scale, using a Playmobil witch I put together to set a forest where a giant hides among trees...

So, in closing...can you believe these weirdos?

"And I thought the brain whoozits and cut-in-half dolls were weird!"

These are fun strange dolls, though definitely not on par with mass-market fashion dolls in the Western market. The articulation is better than some Barbies, but the plastic is softer in places a Mattel doll's wouldn't be, and there's not a lot of consistency in joint tightness in either direction, plus the outfits proved fragile. These aren't problems exclusive to the Chinese toy market, though. Western dolls get a lot of their own quality problems and Mattel screws over their own collector Monster High dolls with horrible elbow joints (praying the revived big-sister/little-sister sculpts for Morticia and Wednesday will not have the issue). 

These dolls do have a creative concept and a fair amount to play with, but it feels like quantity is padding the $20 price point without quality being as prevalent. You'd have to sell these for cheaper in a U.S. market. Overall, I find Weird Barbie to have vastly more engaging and rewarding play value. I was so enchanted by her sturdy lifelike Made to Move body and poseability, while I kind of hit a brick wall trying to stage and photograph these dolls. They look good when you find the right pose they can stand in,  and they're enjoyably bonkers, but don't offer a lot of staging potential or massive display variety for me. As "actors", they're a little stiff. I've even found swivel-joint Living Dead Dolls much more dynamic and inspiring. Maybe part of the pitfall is just how weird these dolls are? Dioramas and backdrops are a bit harder to conceptualize for these.

On the designs, the dolls do suffer from a lack of individualism. The dolls all look basically the same pre-transformation, and the blue and red dolls are nearly identical in the way their dresses are constructed and have mostly shared monster sculpts. There's little work put into the masks, such that they don't feel particularly themed to the specific doll, and only the red doll can wear masks that coordinate and match the color of her monster limbs because there are no brown and teal masks among the nine in this range. The blue doll does have the most unique masks, though, and the green doll's dress and monster sculpts are entirely unique...but her mask face designs aren't.

I also can't ignore the possibility that parts of these dolls infringe on the sculpts of earlier dolls.

Still, how can you say no to the deranged nature of these creatures? Their abrupt monster parts make them feel charmingly thrown-together and capture the spirit of a child's Frankentoy experiments really well, and the storytelling of these magical ladies transforming offers lots of avenues. I don't think the lack of polish does the dolls favors in most respects and I'd surely prefer these done better, but nobody else is doing 'em better right now. There aren't especially lovely big-deal dolls, but they're cute for a bit of fun.

Just generally steer clear of Temu for your own sake, though.

Whoever wanted conventional toys, anyhow?