'REBORNING' Bringing life to dolls

Reborners turn store-bought dolls into realistic -- and lucrative -- works of art.
By DENISE FLAIM
LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY
SMITHTOWN, N.Y. -- Snuggled in a Moses basket on Laura Henning's couch in Smithtown, N.Y., Emily is an undeniably beautiful newborn. Wisps of dark hair frame the sleeping baby's face, her scrunched pout hinting of newly minted dreams.
She's just been sold on eBay for $575 and will soon leave the quilt-lined basket for a cardboard box, priority-mailed to her new "adoptive parents" in Indiana.
"Some people get very attached to them, like it's their own child," said Henning, a 31-year-old mother of three, adjusting Emily's magnetized pacifier. "I've had people say, 'Give her a snuggle for me when you ship her.'"
Highly realistic dolls like Emily have a quasi-sci-fi, quasi-evangelical moniker -- "reborns." Popularized on the sprawling eBay auction site, "reborning" has become a cyber cottage industry pioneered mostly by stay-at-home moms who see it as an avenue for artistic expression and extra income.
The technique
Most reborn dolls start life as cheap vinyl babies made by a German company named Berenguer, some of which sell in the Kmart toy aisle for as little as $20. But at the hands of self-taught artists such as Henning, they are disassembled and rebuilt in a transformation worthy of Michael Jackson: Hair and eyelashes are re-rooted with mohair or, sometimes, real human hair. Mouths and noses are spliced open and eyes replaced. Bodies are re-weighted with sand or kitty litter to replicate the heft of a real baby. Faces and limbs are tinted inside and out, then painted in countless layers to simulate the blush-suffused, vein-traced translucence of newborn skin. Then, the reassembled creation is given a name.
The end result is a doll so realistic that some newborn artists receive indignant e-mails, admonishing them for selling live children on eBay.
Nobody quite knows how "reborning" was born, said Dawn Marie Garma of Lupton, Mich., who has been creating these lifelike dolls for two years. "I think it started when someone took apart a Berenguer doll, colored it inside to give a lifelike tone," then sold her handiwork on eBay, she said. From there, it has snowballed into a tight-knit international online community. Reborners congregate on Web sites such as Garma's www.angelicreborns.com, where they trade ideas and brainstorm over such questions as where to find a supplier for neck flanges and whether Josie should become Joey.
In a corner of Henning's living room is a plastic storage container crammed with the tools of her trade: Pure acetone to strip off factory-issue paint. Tubes of oil-based paints. Marine glue to secure glass eyes. Stringable lettered beads for making ID bracelets.
Attention to detail
Preemies are extremely popular, Henning explains, nodding in the direction of Autumn, a red-haired preemie who recently sold on eBay for $305. Details count, right down to the magnetic umbilical cord that attaches to Autumn's navel. Henning bought the plastic umbilical clamp that caps it from an online midwife-supply company.
"It's an evolving art -- a year ago, we weren't sculpting faces or removing the molded hair," said Henning, whose purple living-room walls are covered with baby pictures of her three children. She has spent hours, she said, staring at her sleeping daughter, 2-year-old Izabella -- for whom her Web site, www.bellababiesnursery.com, is named -- trying to capture the flush of a cheek, the curl of an eyelash.
"My husband never knows when he comes home if it's dinner or body parts in there," she continues, nodding in the direction of the convection oven. Once a doll's vinyl skin has been heated to the point where it is workable, Henning's oven-mitted hands manipulate the face into an expression she wants; then, she plunges it into cold water to set.
Doll artist Maryanne Oldenburg of Waldo, Wis., who has been designing and making dolls by hand for 30 years, said the reborns are part of a larger trend.
"I find them fascinating because what they do is no different than the repaints,'" she said, referring to collector fashion dolls such as Barbies and Genes that artists repaint, re-dress and then sell on eBay as well.
And although some elite doll artisans who create from scratch may look down on reborners as just second-rate rehabbers, "some of the better dolls are phenomenal," said Oldenburg, who owns one herself. "The quality is there as in a one-of-a-kind."
Well-known reborner
Arguably one of the best-known and most successful reborn artists in the country is a woman who will identify herself only as Kimberly Angel from Idaho. Selling under the eBay user name "AngelsBabies," Angel is a self-described perfectionist: Each of her babies has tens of thousands of micro-rooted hair follicles and a custom cloth body with silicone inserts to simulate baby fat, and is accompanied by a handmade quilt created by her seamstress-mother.
It takes a month, sometimes longer, for Angel to make a doll, and when they do finally hit eBay, her creations can fetch in the thousands, like Cassandra, who sold recently for a whopping $3,250. Admittedly, her materials -- such as expensive mohair for the hair rooting and pricey Baby Beau & amp; Belle outfits as a finishing flourish -- don't come cheap. But the dolls still bring a tidy profit for the stay-at-home mother of two.
"I started doing them as a way to help support my family. I'd never in a million years dreamed that I'd get this response," said Angel, who does not accept private commissions or have a Web site. She also never expected to experience a backlash of nasty e-mails, fake electronic bids -- even, she said, death threats from other reborners who were jealous at how much her dolls were bringing on eBay.
"To me, it's a very serious art form," Angel said, adding that she dreams of each baby she creates. "On eBay, there are quite a few people trying to cash in on reborning who don't know what they're doing." She's heard stories of dolls painted with makeup, stuffed with dirt, rubbed with Armor All.
"Everyone's doing it for the money, because if people don't buy them, you can't make more," Angel acknowledged. But there's something almost mystical about creating these tiny individuals, who with their handmade outfits and dewy skin are about as close to real as you can get.
"Certain babies speak to certain people -- they remind them of a certain child," concludes Angel, who said she can't imagine not reborning. "I have a lifetime of babies in my mind."