A Little Snow Angel: Living Dead Dolls Series 12 Frozen Charlotte by Mezco Toyz

Since I started collecting LDD, this doll was always in mind for one of my big Christmas items, and I didn't want to change that plan. I also would be able to capitalize on working up and publishing her post by the time of her deathdate...I just hoped the weather would be appropriate for photo sessions in that time.

I'm glad to have her done so quickly and wrap up 2024's acquisitions in short order! I'd be publishing her whenever I was able to get the photos, but the earlier, the better!

Like Chloe...and Cuddles (man, Series 12 is brutal on the current aftermarket), Charlotte is a sought-after, expensive doll, and is the most so of her series, being a common fan grail. It's understandable why. Despite her icy pallor and cracked design, Charlotte is one of the cutest and sweetest Living Dead Doll designs out there with her fluffy vintage winter coat and malice-free facial expression without super scary tones, like her "adorable appeal" runner-up Chloe. As such, Charlotte has some of the greatest outsider pull for people who are otherwise put off by the horror theming of LDD, and her design is very nice and fancy and seasonal. She's also pretty complex in her construction.

Frozen Charlotte's sweeter appeal was the factor that got her chosen as the LDD spotlight years back on the Toy Box Philosopher blog. Emily reviewing her there encountered a concerningly moldy worn doll with a heat-damaged sealed coffin on her copy, so I hope mine will have no such problems. Mine is also sealed, which is unsurprisingly the only way she's showing up on the market right now. It doesn't seem like her prices have escalated since TBP Emily's review. They're about the same level of ridiculous.

"Frozen Charlotte" sounds more like the name of a Garbage Pail Kid than a typical Living Dead Doll, who don't really go for the "adjective-name" pairing much, but it enhances the understanding of her dual concept that plays well with the literal aspect of LDDs as actual dolls. What do I mean?

Well, Charlotte is a little doll who died in the ice, and is loosely inspired by the story "A Corpse Going to a Ball" and its ballad adaptation "Fair Charlotte" (listen here), where a young woman freezes on a carriage ride driven by her beloved and arrives at a winter ball dead when she refuses to wear warm layers over her pretty dress. I'm not entirely sure what the takeaway of the story is meant to be, because I find Charlotte very difficult to mourn or sympathize with. Her death comes across as vanity and a pure lack of common sense that feels very unrelatable today now that ball "society" culture is largely bygone. Also...Charlotte's love interest is named Charlie? That's a little too weird.

LDD Frozen Charlotte is also (again, loosely) a Frozen Charlotte--that being the exact name for a style of cheap Victorian china doll made of one unarticulated piece of porcelain, with the Frozen Charlotte doll style being named after the same aforementioned story. Some Frozen Charlottes even had coffin boxes, making them essentially the original Living Dead Dolls--no wonder Mezco referenced them! So the LDD is both Frozen Charlotte meanings in one! 

A collection of tiny Charlottes.

Purportedly a Victorian Frozen Charlotte in a coffin box, but unverified.

LDD Charlotte is obviously vinyl with fiber hair and she's more complex and large than a true Frozen Charlotte doll, but she's deliberately evocative of blue china with her design, and blurs the visuals of cracked ice and cracked porcelain in her look. (Oh, if only my custom spooky faux-china doll Dahlia survived!) So there's layers and some really clever thought behind her concept and name, moreso than you'd gather at first glance where she just looks like an ice-themed character.

It's surprising, then, that her design concept and death story are separate from the old tale--she's a little girl who skated and fell in a freezing pond, not a woman who froze to death to not cover or disturb a pretty dress. I find LDD Charlotte's tale less frustrating, since a fun-loving naïve kid defying advice and dying in a chilly pond is more understandable than a young woman refusing to layer up in cold weather.

As mentioned, my Charlotte was sealed. The shape of her bangs looked promising, if perhaps worrying me about the hair being fried, and her earmuffs were halfway off her head. The image is quite yellow, but I'm used to the clear coffin lids aging poorly and I expected a much whiter doll underneath.

Charlotte is so childlike and delicate behind the "glass" of her coffin that I'm reminded of the body of Rosalia Lombardo, a little girl remarkably embalmed and displayed in a glass coffin who had become a morbid attraction for looking like she was still alive and sleeping. Her preservation became a thing of mystery and interest in the mortuary world as a result and legends spawned about tiny Rosalia opening her eyes in her coffin due to illusions making her appear to blink. Look up at your own risk, because the subject is an embalmed body, but not a grotesque one at all.

Once lifting the lid, I was reassured about the doll's color. Not perfect at all (I can already tell this girl will need cleaning and peroxide whitening), but much snowier.

Charlotte continues the Series 12 chipboard design first seen on this blog with Chloe, with a very dramatic flat black background and red trim and text next to a skull stylized to match the character. I think the design worked much better for Chloe, whose colors matched the chipboard.

Chloe's chipboard is one of the most artistically striking in the brand. Charlotte's blue earmuffs create more contrast in a way that isn't as appealing. I also think that Series 12 ought to have red tissue to match the chipboards, though Charlotte's skull would contrast all the more. Red and this classic OG pink are the two most overused LDD tissue colors, so it's strange for me to suggest swapping one for the other (as opposed to literally anything else), but I do think red tissue would work with this graphic design more.

Charlotte's chipboard poem says:

Fair Charlotte was a frozen corpse

And no more a word she spoke

Her flesh had become like fine china

And just as easily broke

"Fair Charlotte was a frozen corpse" is a direct lyrical quote from the ballad "Fair Charlotte", and the line about her speaking no more is a paraphrase of another part of the song. The rest of the stanza is original to the LDD poem. The poem refers to her having flesh turned to metaphorical china, though the doll herself can just as easily be read as a character who is a literal porcelain toy.

The changes I'd make are very minor.

Fair Charlotte was a frozen corpse
And a word no more she spoke
Her skin was chilled as china
And just as easily broke.

Charlotte died on the last day of 1840, December 31. Had the snow not migrated from December to January these days around here, I would have been able to publish this review on the day! Oh, well.

Her certificate poem says:

Disobeying her mother's wishes, Charlotte literally skated on thin ice
Falling through the crack beneath her feet, she paid the ultimate price.
So next time you don't listen to your parents, think of the dreadful sight
Of poor little frozen Charlotte, rotting in the lonely cold winter's night

This is a long poem, and it's a little awkward to hear references to defined offscreen characters in LDD poems, but it captures a spirit of cautionary moralizing to children that suits her time period, and offscreen characters are less strange as long as they aren't named. How about:

Thin ice proverbial killed the girl
When once on frozen pond she skated
Disobeying Mother's word
And warnings that the girl had hated
It cracked, she fell unto her doom
A corpse to roam but never rot
A warning to all little ones
Whose gift advice may be forgot

I tried to work in the wordplay about the metaphoric thin ice without making it feel so jokey and modern. I think this works as a Victorian warning poem. Charlotte also doesn't look too decayed and I thought invoking the eeriness of a body preserved by cold was more appropriate than describing her as rotten.

Here's the doll unboxed.

I've said it before, but if the Oz: The Great and Powerful China Girl was an L. Frank Baum creation and a truly iconic character from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, rather than a sequel/prequel character from a fanfic movie nobody cared about, I can imagine Frozen Charlotte would have immediately been cast as the China Girl in the LDD Presents Oz line, given that they're both dolls in a blue-china theme.

Charlotte's costume starts at the very top with her earmuffs, which are a totally unique costume piece in the LDD brand. No one else except Resurrection-variant Charlotte has worn earmuffs. This piece has a powder-blue band that matches the coat, and fluffy white ear poms. The band is all wired to be adjustable, but there's a clear elastic chin strap below to keep the earmuffs pressed tight to her head.

The elastic felt a little melty or greasy with age, so I elected to cut it off. Charlotte can keep her earmuffs on without it, and the wire helps. It's just not as secure as it was. The wire ought to have been much stiffer, and if it was, then no chinstrap would have been necessary. I have dolls coming up as a review where I found that just using stiff craft wire to replace their complicated fiddly ribbon headbands was an extremely elegant and functional improvement. I felt around Charlotte's headband, but it didn't look like there would be an easy way to gut it of the wire it has and replace it without fully ruining the piece.

Charlotte is much like Chloe in a way besides being cute and popular--she's also a known concern with the rooting of her bangs. Charlotte's hair is ostensibly meant to have split bangs parted across her forehead, but the hair tends to go quite anti-gravity. This copy happens to have the least floaty bangs I've seen on an untouched Charlotte, and the cut seems better than other copies. I've seen Charlottes who seem to have bangs swept more to one side with longer lengths, but these seem more even and characterful, with the bangs not going all the way across and side locks on either side. I hope these will boil down and comb smoothly.

The rest of Charlotte's hair is rooted just on the perimeter of the scalp for the high ponytail style she wears. Her pony is fairly long. The hair is white, and I was worried about it being yellowed, though I did have the reassurance that hair yellowing could be fixed. 

This was about the point where I had to stop the review discussion and take Charlotte to be cleaned, however. Her face had greasy spots, brown flecks, and yellowing that I really wanted to take care of.

The brown dots worried me the most after TBP Emily encountered brownish mold on her Charlotte, but on my copy, the marks scraped off with a toothpick and there was no damage or discoloration to her earmuffs, assuaging my concerns of mold infecting the doll. I took her for a dunk in peroxide.

I had also noticed when trying to balance her that her hips were stiff and immediately stopped trying to move them, remembering how her series-mate Chloe's right hip peg completely broke when I tried to move a stiff leg and ultimately got me to replace Chloe's whole body. After Charlotte's first peroxide soak with the day's remaining sunlight, I boiled her hair and then her body to relax her vinyl and work her hips into motion. While they're still tight, I got them moving in full circles without the joints shattering. Thank goodness. In theory, Charlotte's body could be replaced with a newer white one too, if I took the extra effort of popping all of her painted limbs off and swapping them onto the newer torso's joints, but it'd be a hassle and I appreciate the doll not making herself any more expensive. 

Charlotte's original hair elastic completely crumbled, so I fashioned her a new hair tie of a small white elastic loop. 

I've used the material multiple times now and its best asset is that it superglues to itself securely and very quickly. I expect this tie to hold up much better than a rubber elastic, and the original color suits her fine. I'll need to look into black elastic for some other characters. When cleaned up, her hair exhibits a slightly sparkly quality as its strands catch the light, which reminds me of a lot of Rainbow High dolls. I didn't get this sparkly look from other white-haired LDDs, but I can't quite say this was deliberate on Charlotte.

Her bangs did boil down easily, and when dried, they sit close to her face in a very spiky icicle shape! I don't even know how intentional that was, but it's perfect for her.

My second day with Charlotte was entirely overcast, so I used my UV flashlight on her while she was dunked.

I still didn't completely whiten her face with this, so it was either keep trying in sunny lighting or give up. My next ploy was to lie her in a thin rectangular soap mold for the most space-efficient vessel that would require the least volume of peroxide to cover her. Her arms had to pop off to fit her in, and I wedged them against her to keep her from floating up, then added some weights on top of her for real insurance, and chased the natural sunlight. Fluid got inside her torso and legs, so I had to make some small holes for drainage. It wasn't something I felt good about, but it had to be done. Ultimately, some yellow patches still remained on her face. I can keep trying in the spring when sunlight and warmth are more reliable, but she ended up good enough to publish. 

Back to the regular review look-over.

Charlotte's body color is meant to be stark white, though I don't think, even at her newest and cleanest, she would have been as brilliant and white as the fur on her costume, and she has a slight yellow-green cast next to pure whites. Other in-hand photos of different copies have reassured me this is normal for her. This is acceptable, since porcelain dolls are not always the purest white tone, but man, I'd have loved if she was that bright and matched to her costume tones. She has a very gentle face looking upward. 

She lacks eyebrows that could have lent her a wicked edge, and her smiling expression is pretty cute. Her paint brings in the darkest blue tone of the doll and likens her the best to the famous colors of blue china, whereas the rest of her blue is paler than classic ceramic. I really like the sparkly iris design with its blurred white feeling like glaze, and she also has some nice lip highlights including lined corpselike definition which was sculpted on her Series 12 co-star Tessa and also only painted on S12 Chloe. I think Isaiah in S11 may have been the first with such lip detail (painted), and pictures of my S16 Isabel, reusing Tessa's head, can demonstrate how it was sculpted on that face:

I think the white highlights in Charlotte's face paint both contribute to the blue-china aesthetic and suggest a glossier effect that the doll is not physically finished with, which is very clever. Perhaps Charlotte ought to have been glossy outright, since that's the de facto look for blue china, but many classic porcelain dolls go for a bisque (matte) finish, so it's not out of line here and the face paint is a good compromise. Despite dolls like Frozen Charlotte, my custom Dahlia, and the Oz China Girl mixing blue china and china dolls, actual historical porcelain dolls didn't correspond with the visual aesthetic of blue china patterns. One was a toy and the other was tableware, and never the two were combined. The closest you got was blue china decor figurines who wouldn't have been children's toys and didn't count as dolls. But I say phooey to historical accuracy. Stylized dolls based on blue china are fun!

Real traditional porcelain dolls were rarely very articulated, and for full-body ceramic dolls, the heads and torsos were usually one piece while the arms and/or legs could rotate, strung on by wires or elastic inside the body. Otherwise, porcelain head and hands (and sometimes feet) would be attached to a cloth body connecting the extremities and head. Certainly, a fully-glossed articulated ceramic doll would not be logistically feasible to make, so the China Girl must remain in the realm of CGI and plastic, and Return Eggzorcist must also be rendered in plastic form to achieve her concept. In that regard, Charlotte not being glossy makes her jointing a bit more plausible. She would kinda be able to approach this body scheme as an actual bisque ceramic strung together with wire or elastic...you'd just hear a lot of unpleasant nigh-misophonic scraping friction sounds when moving her parts. I'd expect a Return Charlotte remake to be glossy because Eggy was, though a matte "bisque" finish would be more plausible.

Here's all of my cracked faux-antique dolls now. Only Evangeline isn't certain to be mimicking ceramic, as she could just as well be composition. 

Left to right: LDD Agatha, LDD Evangeline, LDD S12 Frozen Charlotte, LDD Return Eggzorcist, Jakks Pacific Oz: The Great and Powerful China Girl

I think the most plausible faux-porcelain doll design by LDD is still Agatha. Her greyish matte body color really sells the aged-ceramic look, and her very fine cracks feel realistic, as does her overall styling read easily as a believable vintage doll. Evangeline is very well sculpted and nicely painted, but her metallic mirror effect in the missing chunks of her face adds a fantasy element to her superstition curse. Return Eggzorcist is more detailed and glossy, but her highly-jointed body design is too elaborate for gloss-glazed ceramic and her look is outlandish. Agatha's five joints could be done on a bisque-finish doll like she appears to be. 

LDD does have two real porcelain dolls in 18-inch upscaled renditions of S1 Posey and the ghoul Abigail Crane. The two are very similar designs, as if Abigail is the Sin to Posey's Sadie, but Posey had many editions while Abigail Crane had just the one in her two-pack. I don't know what percentage of these LDD porcelain dolls were ceramic, but I'm willing to bet from the posture in the photos that the bodies and limbs were stuffed fabric while the heads and hands were ceramic. I saw the feet were ceramic too, though, so I don't know if the torsos are actually fabric or not. The dolls have a bisque finish.

Porcelain Posey.

Porcelain Abigail.

Alright, back to Charlotte's actual review.

Charlotte's main spooky feature is the huge stylized blue shatter cracks in her skin, the first of which is seen prominently on her forehead. There's a slight cartoony nature here with the colors being all blue and bold, but it works for the blended themes of broken ice and blue china. While I'd say the cracks lean on the abstract because cold wouldn't make either a human or a doll shatter like ice, and the cracks thus feel more like a stylistic expression of freezing than a literal feature, this cracked design and the context of Charlotte's name do make her more obvious as an LDD literally portraying a doll rather than a human. Even if cold wouldn't make porcelain more notably fragile, a china doll could break like this from a normal impact. And technically, rapid heating while the porcelain was frigid could also pose a cracking risk.

My copy of Charlotte has a small indented vertical deformation between her eyes on the bridge of her nose.

Charlotte's other cracks are seen on the back of her neck (I always love when LDD head paint goes past the frontal face) and on the side of her left leg. 

Charlotte's main costume piece is this darling powder-blue winter coat which feels appropriate for her Victorian timeframe, but honestly could probably have been stylistically relevant up to the 1940s at least. 

The coat has an attached capelet-style collar with white fur trim, and has a flaring triangular cut with a waist seam, a loose-pleated lower half, and two simulated columns of buttons in four rows. The two columns are not far enough apart to qualify this as a double-breasted look, but it's intricate. A child might need an adult's help to do this coat up. The material of the coat is soft and fleecy, but it's that kind of fleece that's a little catchy and feels bad on your fingernails. There are definitely much worse grades of this kind of material, like the stuff a lot of cheap carnival-prize/claw-machine plush are made of. Charlotte's fabric isn't nearly that unpleasant. This material sticks to velcro a lot--as such, I wasn't surprised to see that the coat closes in front with a hook velcro strip that applies directly onto the fabric on the opposite panel, with no matching loop strip. Chloe's dress and Jinx's shirt also velcro'd directly onto themselves, but each had a separate different fabric material from Charlotte's coat.

Around her hands, Charlotte is wearing mittens in the same fabric as her coat. The fur cuffs are part of the coat, while the blue mitts are separate pieces. 

The mittens are not perfectly fit to her hands, with her hand thumbs not nearly filling the thumbs of the mittens, but I imagine they're cut to be able to pull on and stay on first and foremost, and they look proper. It can be a little tricky to get the thumb into the mitten's wrist, but once it's in, the mitten isn't sliding and falling off without being pulled. I appreciate that.

Here's the hand on top of the mitten to show the fit.

Similar mittens would later be seen on trick-or-treat piggy Squeak in Series 16, possibly with the same pattern, though I'd wonder how her gripping hand worked with them. It looks pretty natural. I just wonder if both of her mittens are sewn the same.

Squeak holding a pumpkin bucket with a mittened gripping hand.

If I don't clean out all of LDD Halloween next year, I do feel like Squeak is still likely to be on my list. 

Frozen Charlotte has no clothing under her coat, and, like...dear child, no, that's how you get hypothermia before falling in the pond! In terms of production, this is understandable given that clothing under the dress would be wasted visually, and the other complexities of her outfit would have likely pushed an under-layer out of that budget. Also, Charlotte would be most likely to be wearing a long-sleeved dress at this time of year, and that would be a nightmare to wrangle with the snug sleeves of her coat and her mittens combined. I can forgive Mezco leaving her under-layer implied. Her underwear paint matches her coat, and her limbs have rings of powder-blue blushing to make her look more doll-like and cold. 

I think the blushed effect would be most likely on a bisque-finish porcelain doll and probably wouldn't happen on a glossy one, so it checks out here.

I first encountered such blushing, in about the same color, on the Series 10 Wolfgang I got for custom parts.

Neither doll is pure white, but Wolfgang is absolutely less white than Charlotte.

This was a big reason I turned him into icy cryostasis Bedford, since this detail makes much more sense for an ice character!

I still don't quite see why Wolfgang had this detail, especially because it was entirely covered by his clothes. Maybe, given his Exorcist theming, it was a reflection of how cold Regan's room became under her possession?

Here's Charlotte's neck and leg cracks unobstructed.

Like Chloe, Charlotte has palm holes for accessories, but none to hold. I think the only S12 doll with an accessory in this system was Tessa, using the updated kitchen knife with the palm peg which I've first encountered on S7 Gluttony.

Charlotte's most special feature is probably her ice skates. These are a modified pair of white LDD round-toed boots with fur trim and pom-pom strings on the ankles and silver blades on the bottom. With the height of the blades and boots combined, Charlotte stands at a tall height next to other clothed LDDs. Series 4's Lulu and Series 21's Peggy Goo would be of comparable height, with each having a boot mod that turns the shoes into roller skates and makes them taller.

The fur and pom-poms are glued on like the later doll Nohell's boots, but Charlotte's boots look to be a separate mold from the standard, with the blades affixed into slots in the bottom. 

Nohell's boots, with real jingle bells on the cords.

Charlotte can rock a little back and forth on the blades, making her a bit less steady, and her lack of socks doesn't help, either. 

Frozen Charlotte got a Resurrection solo release during the same era as Chloe and Cuddles got their solo Res dolls, and they all rounded off the original Series 12 cast within the Resurrection line. Ezekiel was in Res III, and Tessa was in Res X. The only other original series with all dolls Res'd was Series 3. This last wave of Resurrections was all solo-packaged, released at different times, and not branded within a Resurrection series, though Cuddles came between Res X and XI, making it hard to say she, Chloe, Charlotte, and Maggot can all count as the unofficial Res XII. Realistically, none of them are numbered Resurrections, or else maybe Cuddles is a lone standalone while Chloe, Charlotte, and Maggot are the unofficial Res XII.

Main-res Frozen Charlotte keeps to the original color mapping and the vintage aesthetic, with her design being very believable as an antique doll. This Charlotte is much sadder of face and has an amazing knit bobble hat instead of earmuffs.

Her haircut is a white side-parted bob without bangs.

Res Charlotte's absolutely tragic expression is actually a new face sculpt debuted on her, with the lower lip pulled in to look sad. Resurrection-variant Maggot after her used this sculpt too, but I think she would have been the last. LDD very rarely did sculpts to change a facial expression. New sculpts were always more for gore or monster detail. The only other case I can think  of where a new sculpt was purely depicting a different emotion is the toothy grinning face that was more prominent in the LDD Presents licensed line (two LDD originals wore it, though--Beelzebub and Bea Neath). I don't think any LDD Presents dolls since this Charlotte had the mopey face, though.

I like this doll, but not as much as the original. This is a unique color palette for the stripy tights that show up so often in LDD. She's cute and heartbreaking and I may want her for another time.

The variant has a more modern look with blue hair and a puffy snowsuit, but has a face closer to the original using the normal LDD sculpt with inset eyes, and brings back the earmuffs and the blue color for the mittens.

This version is not a skater!

I do love the ability to mysteriously bundle her lower face with the scarf, though.

Both Resurrections' blue costumes are more vibrant than the original's.

Charlotte was also set to have a Minis rendition in a seventh series, but this set was cancelled. It's a shame, because her costume is perfectly downscaled, and her tiny size makes her even more like an original porcelain Frozen Charlotte doll. Her bangs have a different shape, though, and she does not have skates. I'd understand that if Minis Lulu didn't previously depict her roller skates, but she did, and so I think Mezco could have done Mini Charlotte's ice skates properly.

This would have been the first Minis series with an entirely eclectic selection rather than a cast based primarily on a single series or exclusives. Seen are S11 Rain, S12 Frozen Charlotte, S15 Death, S13 Morgana, and S8 The Lost. The Lost adds shoes, but barefoot Minis are possible and lacking shoes would be more accurate. I wish I could have her, too. It looks like Death might have glowed in the dark!

I don't know if there's much salient commentary I can make to explain how much I am charmed by this doll. She's extremely dear and pretty in a way that speaks for itself, but I worry I'm underexpressing how much affection I have for her. She's like the perfect Victorian ideal of a tragic innocent child who met an untimely end, but she looks to have taken it very well!

She's not in perfect condition, and those yellowed spots I couldn't fix on her face (yet) still bother me, but she's still lovely and she's absolutely a prize.

Charlotte can wear the China Girl's dress, which is floor-length on her. The fit is decidedly loose around the torso, but she looks incredible in it.

This is a look worth freezing to death for, and suits the original "Fair Charlotte" story.

My poor China Girl's neck is broken inside, leaving her head floppy, so it could be worthwhile to get a second copy in better condition and take the spare dress for Charlotte to wear in the off seasons. It'd be worth giving the China Girl a review spot after so many times bringing her into conversation as a bystander.

Charlotte looks really good in blacklight, as one might expect. This shot here was the best I could get as far as capturing what my eye sees. The phone camera interprets the color very differently.

And here are some other shots.

These were my favorite blacklight pictures. I love how stylized and dramatic and spooky the lighting is.

The first snow of the late year came in November, and I took advantage of it to snap a couple of Charlotte pictures. It wasn't cold enough to freeze water, so I couldn't stage her on a pond yet, but I did dig the hole I would be using in the right weather, should it arrive. At the moment, I just got two quick shots.

She can't quite do snow angels because her joints don't move that way.

I was glad to have not wasted this time, since this snowfall was really temporary. After noon, it was already melting and slushy, and it was gone the next day. I remember when we would get snowed in.

It was also oddly gratifying to see that nature had the doll's back--these photos indicate that Charlotte's skin and hair are more the color of actual snow! Her costume is whiter than the real precipitation! Shame on you, costume, making me insecure about this doll's shade. She's actually spot-on!

I then got out the painted-glass "ice" tank I made for Bedford and put Charlotte in it, just using white light as illumination to make her look encased in ice. It's such a different tone without the sci-fi lighting, and it's really stunning!

These were my two favorite takes.

More snow started coming in January and I hoped for the best for her photo prospects. While I waited, I photographed her against the blue winter sky.

Then I finally had a sufficient snow to put her on her pond. I'd dug a hole outside to stage the frozen water with, but actually freezing it wasn't viable, so I used a pane of glass over the hole instead, and once enough snow froze to it, there was no telling the difference. The surface of the glass and the size of the hole beneath are very small, but it works. You skate where you can.

Charlotte started sliding backward because the glass isn't level, and her skates were making strokes in the snowy surface, so I realized she could do a figure eight...and then realized she could do one better--the sulfur!

Then she sat down.

The nice thing about faking the ice is that I could easily lift up the pane of glass to put her under the surface!

Then I broke the glass to show her falling into the pond. Without actual water and with less visual clarity, I don't think this reads great, but so be it.

If I had an actual pond frozen to work with, I'd get a better death picture for this character.

Nohell made a snowman back in her review.

And if she did, then Charlotte definitely needed to! And Charlotte has three pieces she can dress it with!

Here's Charlotte buried in the snow.

And sitting covered in snow. It was a busy day!

And at the end of this photoshoot, just as I was trying to see if she could do snow-angels after all, Charlotte's left hip peg snapped anyway after all my care in averting the scenario earlier. Thanks, Mezco. Idea cancelled. 

I extracted the pieces of the peg (difficult on the torso; the glue was strong on the translucent plastic) and replaced the peg altogether with an intact newer opaque one from a dummy LDD body I had. I had been thinking of a custom character maybe, but never got anywhere with it, and then devoted the body to experiments, so I was able to easily harvest a hip peg for Charlotte to use.

While I was at it, I also fixed Agatha's right hip. I realized her leg swiveling too easily was indeed because her joint peg was just turning inside the torso socket (so the leg wasn't moving on the ball at all when the hip turned). The joint never fell out because it wasn't actually tearing out of the body when it spun. It was popped in securely, just not glued in a static position, so the doll wasn't going to break when the peg turned...the wrong part of the joint was just moving. I heated Agatha's hip and pulled the peg out, pulled the leg off the ball, glued the peg in so it would be static, and reattached the leg. Glad to have that done; she's an important doll.

Frozen Charlotte's aftermarket expensiveness isn't justifiable, obviously. She's an old doll today and put me through a ton of maintenance...but on a wholly aesthetic level, I get it. She feels almost scientifically endearing without being remotely cynical and contrived in her cuteness, and is such a pretty doll. I also love her vintage costuming and winter atmosphere and meta elements reflecting on older doll types fused with her frigid death. She displays the story of dying on a frozen pond in both literal and abstract ways and refers to an old legend and song at the same time! The doll may not wear many, but the concept has layers! I can't imagine how spectacular a fully-new Charlotte would have felt to acquire due to her elaborate outfit and fun paint details, though her hair would have always needed some care. I was glad it tidied so well, and into such a perfect icy bang shape!

Time has taken its toll on this doll, and she has some yellowing damage to her vinyl which I could not fully reverse. Evidence also indicates she never would have been as brilliantly snowy as her white costume pieces, which is disappointing and may reduce her visual impact. At the same time, she's precisely the color of natural snow, so that's pretty impressive.  Being released during the worst ball-joint pegs of LDD's run hurts her, and that's two for two S12 characters whose hips have snapped on me. I do want Cuddles sometime, so I'm a little leery about that prospect. All the same, every time I look back to her, this frozen doll melts my heart. She's absolutely endearing.

Is it possible the doll's reputation informs her and she's partially special just for being designated as special? Perhaps. But it's not at all difficult to see where her fan consensus comes from. Of the designated fan favorites (the major quartet coming to my mind is Chloe, Charlotte, Maggot, and The Lost), Frozen Charlotte may pan out to be my own favorite too.

One thing's for certain: in the world of Living Dead Dolls, Frozen Charlotte is precious in every sense of the word.