28-inch Barbie Before and After

28-inch Rainbow Sparkle Best Fashion Friend Barbie had tangled and matted hair when found.

During a recent thrift store visit, I saw a pair of long brown vinyl legs on a bottom shelf as I was exiting the toy section.

I grabbed the legs and pulled out a 28-inch Rainbow Sparkle Best Fashion Friend Barbie. The doll was in overall good condition wearing the original rainbow dress, but the hair was a tangled mess. In addition to the tangles, several micro braids by her former little owner/wanna-be stylist needed removing.

The doll arrived with about a dozen micro braids.

It took me two days to untangle the hair and remove the braids.

First, I attempted to detangle it without wetting the hair, which was a mistake. The tangles released better with the hair moistened with water and conditioner. I used Herbal Essences conditioner and worked in small sections.

After detangling each small section, the sections were twisted and plastic bands were added to the ends of the twists. This took several hours on day one.

The back section has been wet, conditioned, detangled, and twisted.

The black hair on the front left that was not braided by the former owner was wet, conditioned, detangled, and twisted.

On day two, the conditioner was rinsed from the back sections.

On day two, the dress was hand washed and hung to dry. Without removing the twists, I rinsed the conditioner from the hair. I wet, conditioned, and removed the remaining micro braids from the front right section. The ends of all sections were still frizzy as illustrated in the next photo. 

On day two, the ends were still frizzy but the top was relatively smooth.

Next, I combined the left and right front black hair and flat ironed it on the lowest setting*.  After releasing the back twists, one at a time, these were flat ironed, too.  This smoothed out the frizzy ends. Some trimming of the back completed the hairstyling.

The black hair in the front is held with a ponytail holder. It was flat ironed until smooth and trimmed.

After flat ironing, the back looks 100% better; the front does, too.

I applied a dab of Karelen dry oil to the black section for sheen. The doll's face and body were also oiled.

Here are before and after photos of the back which was the most challenging to detangle.

On day three, Rainbow Sparkle Best Friend Barbie was redressed and appears almost as good as new.

The black section is super smooth.

The rainbow hair in the black is sleek.

She looks great!

This was my first trip to the thrift store in almost two years and resulted in a great, yet tedious doll therapy session that cost $7.99 + tax and elbow grease.

*This was also my first time flat ironing a doll's hair. I used a small section of the hair to test the initial heat setting of 5 that I used on the flat iron, which was too hot and slightly scorched the hair. I lowered the setting to 1, which worked well to straighten the frizzies.

©Black Doll Collecting/dbg

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