Living Dead Dolls Chloe, Re-Necrotized

Why am I making this post?

Well, you can probably infer there are two distinct reasons from that cover photo. First off--of all the LDD acquisitions I consider to be collective fandom grail dolls, Chloe from Series 12 has had a pretty unfair hand dealt to her. 

She was my first broken hip peg, which I now know to expect from Series 12. I will be very wary of the hips should I get Cuddles. At the time, I didn't have the means or wits to fix it well, so I shuffled her onto another white LDD body after her review. And then, for all my efforts with her hair, it ended up frustrating me, lacking shape, being awfully thinly rooted, and worst of all, having the frying that most old LDD hair seems to end up with. I wanted to try rescuing her further by making her a test subject for rerooting. New, higher-quality fiber ought to fill in her hair well and give it more shape so it matched her official LDD portrait and felt nice. This doll deserved to shine. Also, I've been making more of a habit of spotlighting common LDD fan grails through separate review posts, a treatment Chloe didn't get as I put her into a roundup instead. I thought I might as well give her her own post this way!

I was asked if there was going to be a rerooting tutorial in this post...and there wasn't. I didn't document everything with photos. But I can still write about the basics.

I discussed and performed my first reroot in this post last year in an attempt to fix Minis Isabel. I don't consider that reroot a success--the hair fiber didn't behave or shape well. This was a new attempt, though.

First you have to get the doll bald by cutting the hair as close to the scalp as possible, then scraping the inside of the head (I use a flat screwdriver most of the time) to remove all the roots. Not recommended for wrist comfort, but so it goes. Then very thin tweezers or a swirling from a bent pipe cleaner can get the hair clumps pulled out. This can be a slow process. For ball-joint LDDs, the bottom of the neck socket interior needs to be cut open to access the interior of the head. Rerooting itself is done with a needle tool that's thin enough to punch into the rooting holes in the scalp, and has two prongs on the end. 

The needles insert into a handle tool that has a tightening hub like an X-Acto knife, or just an actual X-Acto knife if they're the really thin kind of needle. My X-Acto tightens more than my reroot tool, but it doesn't accept the thicker needles that came with the reroot tool. It did accept needles ordered separately from another source.

With the tool, you take a thin bundle of hair twice as long as you need and then thread it onto the needle prongs in the middle of the strand, pulling the ends down and holding them against the handle so the hair is tight on the prongs and ready to punch into the head. 

Punch in, and then let go of the hair before pulling the needle out so you don't undo your work! This leaves the hair basically doubled up inside the hair hole, though multiple punches into one rooting hole may be required for the right density of hair rooting. Then repeat this for a long time. Barbie-sized heads are fine. Rainbow High or LDD size is quite a bit more tedious. Maybe you're the lucky one that finds this meditative, but for larger heads, I recommend finding some long-form audio entertainment to listen to while you work--and not forcing yourself to complete the rooting in one sitting.

Needles can break, a lot. If the needle is too long, the whole thing can snap, so you want to make sure the needle isn't sticking out of the handle too far, but it also needs to be long enough to punch deep enough into the head. The more frustrating problem is one of the prongs of a needle coming off and preventing the hair from hooking on, meaning the needle needs replacing. I've heard the tops of sewing needle loops can be cut off to create impromptu reroot needles, but they need a handle that can tighten enough for them, like an X-Acto hub. Bespoke reroot needle handles won't tightly hold needles that are too thin.

Handling the hair for rerooting is also a mess. You can buy hanks of hair ready for rooting, but separating thin pieces without creating a lot of tangles or waste is difficult, and getting enough hair onto the needle without excess is also hard. Usually, you'll have strands that hang as strays in the root job, and you'll have to comb them out later to leave only the hair that actually got punched in. 

If a doll head is rooted particularly sparsely, you can punch in new holes before adding hair to thicken the head. Follow rooted part lines or bang lines if you're trying to replace a factory hairstyle in the same shape. To create a good part or line between bangs and the rest, I defaulted to punching into the same parting line in two directions so the hair was seamlessly divided into sections with no gaps between the lines. You can create a messier part with two rows of rooting which are double-punched in a criss-cross so the gap is hidden with hair combed across in both directions, but I think a single row with hair rooted in two directions is easier and cleaner. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but it seems to work.

After rooting satisfies you with density (it will not be displaying final shape!), swab fabric glue inside the head to get the new roots, and let the glue dry so the hair can comb and pull without falling right out again. Then you can proceed with more confident combing and styling and boiling to shape the hair as intended.

With Chloe, I first plugged in the line that was used for her bangs, rooting them in and then trimming them shorter (but not anywhere close to their final length) so I could visually parse the rooting and know where the bangs ended before adding the long hair. That ensured the bangs weren't cut too wide later. I then rooted from the bottom up as recommended, adding new rooting holes in areas I worried would be overly thin. I've realized that a tight, dense row of hair can compensate for spacing between rows, though. For the top row of rooting, to seamlessly part the hair between the bangs and the back, I punched into the already-rooted bangs row with the longer pieces pulled the opposite direction, as discussed.

Not Chloe's head, but this is what I mean.

I didn't root a center part behind the bangs because that wasn't the original rooting. The hair still needs strategic combing to hide all gaps, but it's lovely having hair that looks so tidy and can comb. The rooting required a pause and purchase of more hair midway through, since I underbought.

Rerooting can be a discouraging process because it looks like there's no chance of it working until the hair is styled and cut. In Cousin Itt mode here, it can seem like a farce.

Swabbing fabric glue inside the head was more worrying since the ball-joint LDDs have trickier interior head access. I did comb the hair free of all the excess that got onto the needle but not into the rooting holes, and then boiled the hair with the hair held down under a scrunchie. 

The bangs worked perfectly and went flat in a moment and were ready to trim. Thank goodness; now I knew I could fix Lottie!! Just cutting the bangs and seeing them look good reminded me how cute Chloe was. I knew her for having the reputation of one of LDD's biggest sweethearts in terms of character design, and I found her really adorable at the time of review, but that has fallen quite a bit to be replaced by frustration with her hair, and feeling it wasn't very flattering in retrospect. I disagree with some of my assessments in the old review where I stated her hair had looked good. I made the effort to actually wave her hair this time because that was her hair texture in the LDD portrait of the doll, and I felt that would greatly help her look and make her all the more adorable. I said I waved her hair and then boiled it flatter again back then, and I should have kept it waved, I'm sure, because my final look for her had issues. With the new hair, I couldn't quite achieve the silhouette in the LDD photo, but I think having voluminous, combable, tidy hair with good flat bangs is more than an upgrade over previous. 

This was Chloe out of the coffin:

Her hair had a bit of wave, but her bangs were the second-worst I've encountered (after Lottie's, which are worst because they never laid flat for anything I did) and her hair was catchy and fried from the start. Boiling it straighter did nothing to flatter her, and kind of made things worse, I think. This design calls for more hair shape. This was about the best she looked with her factory hair.

Here's the reroot. The fiber is saran, but isn't the glossiest. By no means is it fried and catchy (hooray!) but it's not the silky curtain some saran fibers can be.

Perhaps this visual is not a super dramatic difference, but it's not supposed to be, since the aim of this reroot was restoration, not redesign. I'm only editorializing by executing the intended look with better fiber, density, and waving. I'm pretty happy with the result. Maybe the bangs ended up a smidge too short in my endeavors to tweak and even the cut, but she's not going full Aunt Gladys and the original cut was decently high too. The original rooting might have started the bangs a row behind, leaving them longer while hanging at the same length. I think some fabric glue might have seeped into the roots, leaving them a little stiffer and making a bumpy texture across her scalp, but it doesn't interfere with the lay of her hair or the ability to comb her, so that's okay. Now Chloe has a body with less fragile hips and better hair!

Rerooting now feels like it could be a useful piece of my mortician's toolkit when beautifying these little corpses. It's a lengthy, messy process I don't relish doing often, and seems awfully dependent on restocking orders for hair and those damn fragile reroot needles, but for the very most deserving dolls, it's now on the table. Series 1 Sadie is on my list for the future, but I might want to find a silkier saran than Chloe received because I miss the glossy lovely hair Series 1 sported for a few months when I opened her. I can also keep monitoring Series 3 Lilith, and if her hair continues to fry after I've trimmed it shorter twice, then she's on the reroot list. 

I had previously put a pair of black cotton LDD tights under Chloe's stockings to fill and tighten her shoes more, but that made the vinyl of the platforms push out convex and left her unsteady. Taking the layer out, though, left her white skin showing too much through the striped stockings. I own Series 31 Bea Neath, who has black tights of a stretchy shiny fabric that feels misplaced in her outfit, so I swapped the cotton tights onto Bea and put the shiny tights under Chloe's stockings. That worked out fine. (My Series 31 project might get done this year. It's been started since last year on account of getting two of the dolls, but I need three more, plus I want to get two others as prelude. I don't want to leave the idea unfinished past 2026!)

I've noticed since reviewing Chloe that she has some spots of yellow discoloration on her face that I also have on my Series 12 Frozen Charlotte. I'll see if peroxide might be able to fix this, or maybe Remove-Zit, but I know Charlotte's yellow spots have been stubborn. The doll herself whitened overall as much as she was able, but still has separate patches of yellow that peroxide didn't seem to deal with.

Chloe got me on a kick of rerooting, so I'll share my other reroots quickly because I got excited!

Faith doesn't warrant a second revisit post, but she definitely needed an improvement. This was Faith's factory hair.

The rooting was sparse as could be while not being stylistically intended to be sparse, and was fried and catchy on the comb, ruining the intended glossy wet look of the fiber. 

I planned for her reroot simultaneous to Chloe's since she was my first LDD and a desperate case. This hair is like, a shade darker than the original, perhaps, but it's very close. It looks as glossy as I gather Faith's hair was supposed to be for the doll's intended waterlogged wet look and combs like a dream after this, my very first LDD, taught me how awful LDD hair could get. 

The hair has upgraded from "woefully" to "disappointingly" thin; I still would need another hank of hair and several more holes bored in or double-punched for this hair to have truly good coverage, but it's better than before and I'm comfortable stopping here for now. I can fill in more at a later time, but she's complete enough for now, and this character works with the bedraggled look of having lost some hair in water decay--she just needed more than she had. I also deliberately left the hair a lot longer than original state, since I thought it dragging on the ground increased the dramatic sopping wet look of the drowned doll. 

I'm not sure if her original fiber was different from most LDDs. It could have been kanekalon, which would have looked glossier than the average hair when new, and would explain why I felt Faith got so staticky, but I've had static on dolls I know aren't kanekalon, too. This new fiber is saran, which is a glossier texture than Chloe's new hair. I also tweaked her eye paint a bit to add some blue and make the whites around her pupils look less unfocused and wonky. The gaze is still a little uneven, but less jarringly so than before. 

Factory irises.

Tweaked.

The white paint created an illusion that made her look less focused. 

The cloth towel I made her was fraying, so I dabbed some glue around the edges after trimming and also stained it with green paint to match her algal muck theming.

I had briefly entertained rerooting the doll after applying an extra gloss layer, since her head is less shiny and coated than her limbs, but I didn't know what substance would be the best for that effect, and I was impatient besides. She has her original finish.

I'm so glad to have Faith in better standing now too! She definitely deserves it. As my inaugural LDD, and a very simple one besides, she ought to have hair that serves her, not hair that brings her down.

And Lottie. Poor, poor Lottie. Legitimately one of LDD's best character designs, done so deviously dirty by the hair rooting and shaping which could only be classified as "absolute ass". This was what she had to deal with out of the coffin:

You can barely tell those are her bangs because they're nowhere near being in place.

This factory hair had very minimal improvement. The bangs could kind of be held down and boiled into place, but not tidily and not very flat. Her hair fiber itself was both a little too greasy and ratty and untidy at the same time, making it feel thinner and messier, and her rooting was a follicular graveyard with nothing close to coverage.

About the best her factory hair was able to look...

...but this was her scalp.

I rerooted Lottie as a priority case, and the difference is massive. It's not the world's best rooting, but it's competent and tidy!

There are still wide gaps between rooted rows of hair; I didn't add in any rows, but I did tighten the density of hair within the rows she had, as well as adding the parting line behind the bangs that the factory hair could have so desperately used. My rerooted doll's scalp isn't the densest or best covered, but it's a mile better than its original state.

With both Chloe and Lottie, the rerooted hair takes some getting used to just because my work has given the hairstyles a tidier level of polish. I can't say that the jankier hairstyles didn't have their charm, but I'd rather they have dignity and hair that can be combed and tidied, and upgrading the dolls can't be a negative. I love Lottie and now it feels fair to love the whole thing, rather than to make excuses and ignore the hair. I don't have to now--she's just nice all over. Part of me wonders if I should revisit my little Lottie-and-Lottie story by seeing about another Arklu Lottie pack and replacing my Mini doll, but I have so many other ideas in mind and I could see myself bringing back the Mini in another project instead. I liked that story post, but I might have finished with that little world I created.

I also rerooted Minis Sadie for the time being. I love Minis Sadie; she's a charming pocket-sized doll version of one of my favorite classic LDDs, and she's the owner of my dollhouse project, so I wanted her looking her very best. I was unsatisfied with her factory hair because the center part didn't frame her face well and the front of her hair was cut shorter, messing up the silhouette because it curved out the long section more and looked awkward. I wanted to try a reroot to fix her shaping. Here's what factory Minis Sadie was working with--density and quality were okay, but the shape just wasn't.

Here's the reroot. I'll admit, I was worried about the improvements being more limited on a tiny doll just because the smaller heads create more dense hairstyles with more volume as a proportional consequence, but I actually got exactly what I wanted with the new hair! The shaping is great.

While I was able to do Mini Sadie's reroot in one sitting, and it was objectively shorter than the larger dolls' jobs, it didn't feel like it. Still, the results are worth the effort. LDD Minis are so delightful to me that having my main Mini made perfect is a treat.

Now that I have Posey and now that Chloe is presentable, I can pair the two buried-alive dolls in a photo. Posey is the one who shows her death theme clearly, while Chloe could be any goth dead kid. She's a great goth dead kid, but not clearly themed after burial or zombies.

"So, Chloe, about this "rerooting" process...tell me more!"

While Posey would indeed benefit for a reroot, she's far from a priority I want to extend that effort to at the moment. Rerooting is a VIP honor.

But this isn't just a post about fixing up Series 12 Chloe and Faith. I'm also here to review Chloe's Resurrection variant! 

Two Mays ago, I mentioned I liked this doll a lot, and I quickly perceived a wintry tone to the the doll, having visions of framing her buried in snow, and perhaps framing the cross-section burial photo with her in snow itself. I was very proud of that Series 12 picture, but I saw room for improvement. 

Resurrection Chloe is unusual, as she's billed under the Resurrection XII series. Res Frozen Charlotte was the one who taught and blindsided me, but for the longest time, I wasn't aware there even was a Resurrection XII--I had thought the last three characters in the Resurrection line were released as full standalones without a numbered series because the dolls were dropped individually in the model the Return dolls now use. I've gone back and corrected earlier posts which claimed these dolls were an "unofficial Res XII" because they actually were very much the official Res XII--the series just had only three dolls and didn't release simultaneously or with unified packaging. I believe Chloe is actually the third and final Res XII doll, going by the timing of Joshua Lee's first-look review videos on YouTube. He got and reviewed Charlotte's main doll before Maggot and Chloe's. 

Chloe is also also an electronic talking doll and thus has the nonstandard packaging you see above. Electronic talking dolls were done with Cuddles' two Resurrection variants, who had different audio, as do the two Chloes, so this variant is technically the fourth talking doll, but only the second character with the gimmick. I don't fully understand the intent or purpose behind introducing the talking gimmick--it's just a soundbox in the doll's torso with a button--but the "haunted doll" effect is part if the idea. I wonder how choices were made about who got the gimmick and who didn't. I believe only the Res Cuddleses, Res Chloes, and LDD Presents Grady Twins dolls used it (only one twin has the electronics to play the girls' quote which is spoken in unison). By the way, Cuddles was not the fourth Res XII doll, as she released between Res X and XII. Res Cuddles, Res Walpurgis, and Res Rain are the three Resurrections to truly lack a series and be standalones.

I'm not at all surprised to see Chloe in Res XII, though. Like Frozen Charlotte, she goes from 12 to XII without changing her series numeral, and Chloe's reputation as a beloved doll indicated her Resurrection was a long time coming. Before any Res XII dolls released, I myself predicted Chloe for the set, though I was expecting a standard simultaneously-released unified Res series rather than the strange new model of releases at the end of the LDD classic era.

This is my first variant Resurrection doll. Res variants can be some of the scarcest and/or most expensive dolls in the brand, but Chloe fell under my threshold. I might break that threshold for one doll--Res-variant Angus Litilrott, but he would need to be an exception and not a license to expand my threshold!

The packaging is weird. It's a coffin-shaped window box that shares nothing build-wise with the usual LDD coffins. The box is like a hybrid between a rectangle window box for LDD Presents and the coffins, with the front having a window with cutouts and a diagonal pseudo-chipboard for the doll's release title and name, while the brand logo appears twice on the front. The tagline "Haunted doll that talks" is also featured, as well as a 20th-anniversary sticker. 

The sides of the box are folded in and slightly hollow, almost making this look like a sleeve around an inner coffin shape, but the exterior is all one piece. Not sure why they did it this way. It would be cleaner with fully convex sides and no indentations.

The back has Chloe's original chipboard poem written on it, plus the eyes of the main Res edition (suggesting the box is identical for both variants) and a "try me" hole for the button that activates Chloe's phrases. The button isn't exposed by the clothing, so it takes a couple of seconds to find it and press it.

The poem is nicely chosen for this variant because the she actually speaks this one! Main Chloe includes the Series 12 certificate poem in her voice lines instead.

My Chloe's not talking anymore since these batteries are close to ten years old, and only the slightest little blurp of audio goes off when the button is pressed. We'll have to see if she's broken or if she just needs a battery change.

The box opens with a top (or bottom) flap and the tray pulls out, with a cardboard backdrop and two layers of plastic the doll is sandwiched into, without twist ties. The back of the trays has a cutout to reach the button to try her voice in-box.

The doll's death certificate roll is fit into a compartment in the doll tray and the instructions for her electronics are under the tray in a plastic sleeve.

Here's the certificate. It's the same content as the original doll, reprinted in the style of this era of late LDD.

As mentioned, main Resurrection Chloe recites this poem in one of her voice lines.

Here's the doll right out of the box.

Many Resurrections have the effect of translating the source doll's design into two separate concepts with the variant duos, mimicking some details for the main and others for the variant, often leaving it up to the viewer which one is a more faithful adaptation. With Chloe, I feel like the main variant carries more of the letter of the original, with her similar hairstyle and face and dress structure, while the variant carries more of the spirit by maintaining the color allocation and starker design theme. 

Main Res Chloe.

I wasn't immediately impressed by the variant doll on account of the hair. Uh-oh. Chloe's hairline is rooted with a pretty high-contrasted side part, with the left side meant to fall forward over the left side of her face, while the right side is meant to fall backward and expose her ear and the side of her face. I wondered if it was similar to the unusual hairline for Jennocide, perhaps to emphasize hair loss decay, but this isn't the case. Jenn's hair is definitely rooted way up and away in a strange curve to make a quadrant of her skull look stripped bare, while Chloe's hairline is high, but not asymmetrical--her part directions just go in widely different angles.

The issue with Chloe's hair is that it seems too thin to the touch, and also shorter than promotional images indicated. It looked like she'd have had some wave, too, but there's basically one wave in the whole head of hair, and it overall feels too straight, short and choppy for the design. I wasn't hugely optimistic about this.

The real magic of the doll comes in with her face paint, however.

Series 12 Chloe has a strange branching effect around her eyes and lips, while Resurrection amplifies the branching. It seems to be a stylized depiction of shriveling decay, and the Resurrection doll seems to confirm this beyond any doubt. While none of this doll is identical to the base S12 design save the shoes, in spirit, it feels like Res-variant Chloe is simply the Series 12 doll after rotting for a good while longer, with the branching lines in her face eroding out her cheeks and lips more to make her skull unmistakable. The eyes are actually less exaggerated, with branching only on the bottom, but the lips and cheeks are covered in black to shape the skull, while her nose looks rotted away too. The only paint color on her face is stark black, with shading done with a stippled spongy texture. It somehow feels very edgy and grungy punk-goth while also perfectly suiting a stylized antique Victorian horror style which her costume seems to lean toward. A death's-head design on a sweet little girl is very Gothic. 

The black cheek shading extends up to her temples in a stylized form of shadowing. 

I think this face paint is perfect. It straddles the more ornate look of this Chloe and the stark high-contrast colors of the doll, harmonizing with the costume really well. I also like the facial expression. She looks more knowing and mature, perhaps, than Series 12's wide-eyed innocence, but she also looks like she's smiling. Sometimes to a scary degree, but mostly, I still see that sweetness in her.

Chloe's inset eyes are near as simple as can be, with red pupils in solid black sclerae, making her eyes look like hollow voids with red pinprick lights in them. As inset eyes, they inherently look more like eyeballs than the visual wants them to, but I don't mind. 

Chloe's dress is entirely flexible velvet, upgrading in ritziness from the fleecy felt of the original, though the bow was velvet on the S12 doll. 

This dress is trimmed with a lace-effect collar of spiderwebs with a devil's head in the middle. It looks great, and I'm really not sure how this was done.

I know it's not a layer of custom lace fabric tacked down over the velvet. That might be too fine and difficult to achieve, anyway. My next assumption was a negative one. When I ran my finger over the pattern, it felt like flat denser velvet which was merely patterned by a print design, and that seemed dreadfully cheap and disappointing in contrast. But no...the red, every bit of it, is dimensional. Running a needle over the collar catches on every red contour and wiggles it around a little. So what is this? Is this embossed velvet? How do the colors work, and so cleanly? Is the red just a dense velvet applique over the flexible velvet base? Whatever this is is clearly intricate and impressive in some kind of way, even if it's not the lace that it looks to be. I was so ready to say "this doll's hair didn't care and they faked a lace collar in a cheap way" but no. Cool your jets. This collar art is actually a fine piece of production--just not the type it's trying to imitate.

The collar is trimmed around the doll's neck with flexible velvet which also trims the waist, cuffs, and hem. The dress is cut with a waist seam and a flared skirt, unlike the S12 dress, and the belt section is tied in a (lopsided, argh) bow on the back. Chloe's gotta have a bow, so I appreciate one being put here. The belt is sewn in shape and attached to the dress without obstructing the velcro. The belt isn't tacked down all around and can be slid up and down in front.

The velvet material and tailoring of the dress make it look cozy and good for cold weather, while the styling is more fancy and looks further back in time than Series 12 Chloe. Series 12 Chloe could be read as coming from the 1930s-1960s, perhaps, while Res looks most like 1950s or 1960s, and this variant doll looks like she could be late 1800s or so. Chloe died in 2007, so none of her dolls look contemporary to her death date.

Chloe's arms are packaged in plastic sleeves for stain protection, and can pull off down the wrist without undressing the doll first.

Her tights are plain black, and are neither cotton nor the shinier stretch fabric of Bea Neath's tights. These tights feel synthetic too, but they're less shiny and don't look ill-placed in her costume aesthetic. She has standard Mary Jane shoes.

Choe's arm sleeves did nothing to keep her from being stained, and her legs are badly blasted by the tights.

The electronic talking LDDs are only built differently on the torso. The head and limbs are all standard vinyl-cast parts, and the torso is the standard shape, but the torso here is hard plastic with a speaker box in front and her mode switch, activation button, and battery compartment on the back. Chloe's ball joints all behave as normal with fair friction despite the different plastic material of the sockets the limbs and head fit into.

The back has the round button that triggers Chloe's phrases when she's working, as well as the switch which controls her mode.

In box, she's set to "try me", which plays only one phrase. "On" plays all three phrases cycled through by the button, and "off" turns her off, of course. The doll is manually triggered to speak, though having a sound sensor to trigger her voice lines would make her a good surprise haunting gag for Halloween decor. A talking doll is a horror classic, but even more classic is a doll talking unprompted! Talking dolls, however, go back as far as Thomas Edison rigging a wax cylinder into a doll, and have existed for many decades before electronic versions like Chloe here. I honestly would kind of love a more retro pull-string doll audio style for talking LDDs; it'd be really fun and old-fashioned, but there's no demand for that when an electronic soundbox and button are so much easier and cheaper now. Sheriff Woody dolls get pull-strings because of accuracy to a famous IP. Otherwise, you never see it today.

The battery compartment opens to reveal three cells for LR44 batteries, which need replacing if I have a hope of hearing Chloe talk as intended. If the doll were truly haunted she wouldn't need these batteries to speak!

The battery cover is an awkward shape to replace and almost feels like it won't fit back in until it does.

I wrapped up Chloe's body to protect her and then boiled her hair. This surprised me by revealing a bit of length I didn't know it had! I then curled the front lock meant to fall before her face so it would have more wave and texture like I expected, but didn't bother to put the wave all throughout the hair. It took some experimenting with curls and boils to get her hair to just the right balance of wave because I'd gotten it curled too bouncy and pretty with some attempts. I wanted to mix the idea of decrepit hair loss with a little bit of hair texture. 

Here's the two Chloes side by side.

Both dolls prioritize stark black, white, and red contrast and have hauntingly darling appearances. Each uses red velvet and bows in the outfit. Chloe from Series 12 has the most complex activity in the pattern of her tights, while Res-variant instead goes intricate with her collar. Series 12 is more cute and innocent and lightly decayed, while Res-variant is fully dead and very rotted, but still looks quite sweet. I think she carries forth the strengths of Series 12 while doing her own thing. Main Res Chloe weakens it all for me. Her whole look is less stark, with off-white skin and muted colors from her dress pattern, and her face is a less charming version of the Series 12 one, while I don't love the tailoring of her outfit either. The variant doll is by far the definitive Resurrection edition of this character in my book. I'm very glad to have her!

Now for the talking! With new batteries having arrived, Chloe works just fine. I can't share audio clips because Blogger still doesn't correctly process videos for me anymore, but you can hear her voice lines in Joshua Lee's review of the doll on YouTube.

What I think is really cool is that the two variants of Chloe were given different sets of voice lines, though performed by the same voice actor. The voice performance has some distortion and echo put onto it for a more gritty ghostly sound, and the volume is perfectly polite. I've heard talking toys or Halloween decorations which are much too loud for a handheld item, but Chloe isn't a startling or grating volume when alone in a quiet room. She has fewer voice lines than the Cuddles dolls do, but has the advantage of reciting her poems across the two variants. I think the variant lucked out getting the poem written in first-person. It makes less sense for the main to be reciting a poem about herself in the third person. Both Chloes also have fully exclusive sets of voice lines, while the Cuddles dolls share a couple.

Main Chloe's voice lines are as follows:

• It's sooo dark in here...
• I sleep with the worms...(paraphrasing the tagline written on the classic coffin lids--"We're dead. Pure evil. We sleep with the worms." Cuddles' main doll also said "I sleep with the worms" as one line, and both of Cuddles' variants directly recited the other tagline as another--"Deader is better!")
• Claustrophobically confined six feet under/Chloe couldn't move and started to wonder/If I'm stuck down here, will I survive?/It was then she knew she was buried alive (chipboard poem)

Variant Chloe's voice lines are these:

• The spiders and worms are my only friends now.
• Let me out of here!!!
• I lie here alone in this place so gloomy/It's dark and it's cold and not very roomy. My mind is awake and my body is lead/So this is what it feels like once you are dead.

Set to "demo" mode, she only speaks the first two phrases, but not the poem. I'm not sure why a distinction needed to be programmed here. Speaking only one phrase on demo, and three on full activation might make more sense, but with only three voice lines, she might not even need a limited mode. Cuddles had more phrases and halving her lines would make more sense for a demo mode. Perhaps LDD didn't want to alter the electronics and since a demo mode was built into the talking body, had to make use of it despite a smaller pool of audio clips for the Chloes. Maybe all six Chloe lines were at one point going to be used for one variant but Mezco couldn't come up with enough lines for two dolls and just split the six instead?

It's just a novel extra for me. I don't need my dolls to talk, but the gimmick takes away nothing.

My first photos were inspired by postmortem photography in the Victorian era. While actual photos of corpses tend to be reclined due to the difficulty in supporting a recently-deceased person in a pose, many spooky Victorian photographs are erroneously labeled to contain dead people because they're creepy. Unrelated to postmortem photography, but eerie, is the genre of "hidden mother" photos where moms would be covered in a sheet while holding their babies to keep the subject focus only on the baby. The actual effect ended up unintentionally scary by making the mother look like a shrouded ghost or corpse in these pictures.

An example of a "hidden mother" photo.

I wanted to evoke that by reversing the dynamic to show the other person holding the shrouded figure. I wanted a color photo embracing the Chloes' color palette, but did my best to make it evoke the photo effect of an older piece, including limiting the color palette to approach a monochrome photo tint. Even though Resurrection isn't shining here, I adore this picture.

I also staged an alternate pose to make it look like Chloe was also a lifeless corpse stood up, and found a desaturated look that evoked a hand-tinted, selectively artist-colored old photo.

And here's the dolls swapped.

Then I took a bunch of portraits with the new Chloe. 

These two were blacklight photos to make her skull glow, then rendered greyscale and then tinted red.

Here's a new portrait of S12 Chloe. I probably wouldn't have tried photographing her this old-timey without the Resurrection variant, but she works it!

I've also realized that Chloe might actually be the easiest character to turn into a "LDD Mini who never was" custom. Mini Sadie's dress could easily lose the collar and add a little bow to become Chloe's dress, while there are white Minis doll bases that would easily suit Chloe. The repaints for the face and striped legs would be fairly challenging, but a Mini Chloe that looked like an official design that never happened would be quite possible. I might pursue that idea sometime, but it's not necessary in the moment, and I have my doubts the impish energy of the Minis would serve Chloe well.

I then took Res Chloe out for the burial cross-section. This time, I used a cardboard box with flaps folded inward to reinforce it, plus a plastic bin and two more cardboard flaps to create a "shelf" above the coffin and lessen any pressure on top of the lid. Then, I realized I had made things even more astronomically difficult for myself last time I did this photo concept, because testing a doll in the coffin on the floor proved there had been no need to shoot the diorama vertically.

I think the concept of the visual and the idea of standing dolls on top of the "ground" directed me to shoot the S12 photo as a vertical cross-section, but I know today that I could have just edited the stuff on top into the picture in post. My original diorama was a mess of buckling cardboard and dirt begging to tumble forward, and I had to hold the sides of the box together with heavy objects. All that, too, for a picture where Chloe ended up not being at eye-level, thus the items I placed in her coffin with her were wasted by not being clearly visible.

The monstrosity I shot the picture with--not the final shot.

The final edit of the final shot, which is still a good piece--just flawed.

I shot Resurrection Chloe buried fully in snow. While a real burial would be under the dirt, dirt itself wasn't the most accessible at the moment, and I liked the visual of the coffin in a snowdrift. I shot the box flat on its back, and got as much loose snow out before putting Chloe in. I did a version with bones in the snow above her, and an empty version where she looks to camera. My S12 shoot used a nasty Nohell coffin cut open on the side, while this shoot uses a spare Series 5 coffin from replacing my Hollywood. 

I digitally added a snowy forest surface to the pieces. I edited the bones photo as a haiku like the Series 12 piece, and put one of Chloe's quotes on the empty layout. I also had to edit the photo elements to achieve semi-reasonable proportions with the trees aboveground so Chloe and the skull didn't look giant. What was easy about the S12 Chloe picture is that everything above ground was live-shot and LDD-scale so there were no issues with proportions.

I dumped the snow out of my "rig" and kept the boxes so that I might re-shoot S12's burial photo to my satisfaction when spring arrives and dirt is on the table. With the nicer hair and a more thoughtful camera framing and a diorama that's not collapsing, I might get the picture even better. I realized too late that I ought to have taken a picture of Chloe pressing her arms against the coffin lid as if trying to escape. I can do that with either doll when I restage the burial in dirt.

I then got some pictures of variant Chloe walking around the snow, which suits her well. I also included the evergreen tree I shot S12 with, as it pairs just as well with the reds of this version.

Thanks to her electronics, I wasn't willing to risk burying the doll like I did for S12, even if I removed her batteries, stuck cotton balls inside, and wrapped up her torso in plastic. Just seemed like a hassle.

Here are a few last portraits with the dolls.

Here's a half-and-half fusion photo blurring the two dolls.

And finally, a diptych based on the idea the dolls depict the same girl at different stages of decay.

Variant Chloe makes a nice lacy Resurrection duo with Sadie, which is oddly fitting seeing as I considered S12 Chloe to be in the same range of aesthetic appeal as S1 Sadie. I also rang in last year with Resurrection Sadie, and am starting 2026 with Chloe!

One gained bangs in Resurrection, and the other lost them! As far as I know, Chloe has no conceptual relation to Sadie (unlike Sin), but it's interesting that they have similar design trajectories. Sadie's Resurrection is her main variant, though, while my Chloe is the secondary design. Main-res Chloe and main-Res Sadie have less in common with each other, and variant-Res Sadie is possibly more like variant Chloe with her red coloring.

Chloe also might pair well with variant Toxic Molly's green and lace. Her face paint design honestly could have suited Molly's post-apocalyptic vibe, though variant Molly's actual face is also incredible.

For a different contrast, Chloe could go with Resurrection Isaiah's green and modernism, though his body color is less stark.

I'm quite happy with my Chloes.

Series 12 really is a charming doll design and giving her a second chance with rerooting, and unlocking that skill for myself properly this time, was a big achievement. I'm happier with Chloe now...and her Resurrection variant is beautiful. I love her costume and colors and morbid face paint that makes her edgy, antique, and still somehow darling. Her hair needed a bit of care and shaping for me, but I like her a lot, and got to explore my beloved antique Gothic aesthetic with her rich red as my guide. I also appreciate that her electronic talking gimmick compromised nothing about the doll's articulation or design, and isn't too loud. It's a cute little extra with a baffling try-me mode and I enjoy the feature. If I ever get another talking LDD, it'd probably be variant Cuddles if that ended up being possible, but I'd also have to get her original first. 

I expect my next completed review to be Resurrection Frozen Charlotte, now that weather is giving me the chance to photograph her as desired. What is it with me starting years with multiple LDD Resurrection reviews now? Is that subconscious symbolism of rebirth and a fresh start with a new year? Will this keep up or is this coincidence?