since I was very curious about the combination of the male doll's body with a female head, I'm posting this customer review with the customers permission (the customer wants to remain anonymous and does not want to post on forums).
Below is my review of the 170M body and the two heads ordered with it: Herman and Nanase. It's painfully honest, so to avoid giving a wrong impression, let me start by saying that I'm very satisfied with this purchase.
The ordering process and delivery went quickly and without a hitch. When the box arrived, my first thought was: it's so narrow! My first reaction to unpacking the Nanase head was: it's so tiny! Opening the sleeping bag containing the body, I thought: it's so small! And on trying to lug the body up the stairs, I thought: how can something so small be so heavy???
I should add that I'm in very bad physical condition. I'd ordered a lifelike but heavy doll which will take some time to finish, and of which the weight worried me; then the Doll Sweet male doll appeared on the market, so I bought this similar but lighter doll to get an idea of the effort involved in moving such weight, and also because I really liked the heads that I ordered with it. I wasn't sold on the muscular body, since I prefer the skinny look, but its diminutive appearance, not apparent from the photos, makes it endearingly cute. The doll is in fact taller than me, but I'm a lot wider.
The box was delivered to the door. In first trying to move the whole box up the stairs, which was too heavy to do alone, I spotted the arrows and saw that the delivery man had stood it upside down, standing on its neck. Aghast, I put the box down flat, snipped it open, and pulled down the sleeping bag that the doll came packed in to check for damage. The neck pin, where the head attaches, was bent to one side, but unbroken, and was easily pushed back to centre. I took all smaller contents from the box, putting them on a chair for safety. Now to get the body - still in protective foam and bag - up the stairs. I tried dragging the top of the bag, but this bent the feet alarmingly, so I hooked my arms under the body's armpits and dragged it up the stairs, resting every few steps. At the top of the stairs, I found the rigid body would not slide over the topmost step. Trembling with fatigue, I lost my grasp and the unthinkable happened: the body fell back down the stairs, feet first. After a long rest to soothe my nerves, I bent the doll in a partly-sitting position so I could rest its backside on the steps, and tried again, this time without accidents. Expecting the worst, I pulled off the sleeping bag and cut away the foam from the hands and feet: no damage to the former, and the latter only had squashed heels and some dents. What luck! It must have helped that the doll was ordered with rigid joints, so no floppy limbs to catch on anything during the fall and tear the silicone. And then I heard a thud from one of the heads that had rolled off the chair and fallen on its ear, again without damage. I can say this doll has been stress-tested on its first day!
The two heads that came with the body are Herman, the male face that was made for the body, and Nanase, a female head said to be compatible with the male body, which I'd asked for with custom eyebrows and no make-up, to repurpose it into a "boy" face. Also in the box were the manual, three inserts - male flaccid, male erect, and female - and, apart from the grey (for Herman) and long black (for Nanase) wigs ordered, two extra wigs: short black, and long brown. I was quite happy with this, as the short black wig was better suited to boy-Nanase, whose custom eyebrows were completely obscured by the intended wig's long bangs. Herman was ordered with green eyes, which give him a piercing gaze, and go very well with the grey wig. The manual is brief, not including obvious instructions like "don't drop your doll down the stairs", but also not explaining how to put on the head, move the eyes, fit the wigs or put in the inserts, the last of which required powdering. Most of these are explained online. Putting on and taking off the head is simple, while moving the eyes proved tricky.
The Nanase head is the same colour as the body, the Herman head a tint browner. It doesn't bother me, as people's faces are often more tanned than their bodies. However, I saw that I should have specified more than just "no make-up" for the sex conversion: Nanase has much fuller, more mascara'd-looking eyelashes than Herman. One of Nanase's eyelashes is loose in one spot, but since this eyelash is firmly secured at the corners, I think this is a production hiccup and not transport damage: it looks as if glue went on top of that bit of eyelash instead of underneath, and the employee tamped down the lash without noticing. Herman has shorter upper eyelashes, that don't quite run from inner to outer eye corner. Nanase's eyelashes are more firmly stuck in place than Herman's; I knocked off half of one of his eyelashes while trying out eye repositioning, of which each attempt resulted in the iris moving further down. So I hope to find a stick with a small suction cup on the end and try again, as both fingers and Q-tips knock against the eyelashes, and pulling the eyelid away can also make the eyelash come loose. Until then, I'll leave the eyes alone.
A second sex conversion problem is that the Nanase head, being intended for a range of body sizes, of which this one is the largest, really is too small for the male body, not just proportionally, but it doesn't quite fit over the neck. A neck ridge sticks out, and would have to be camouflaged with a scarf. Having said that, I really think it does make a nice "boy" head, and if DS decides to sculpt a second male head, Nanase would be a good base to work from.
Both heads have smallish, thin-lobed ears that I would not risk putting any but the tiniest earrings in, and minuscule mouths and teeth harbouring unattached silicone triangles of which the front is shaped like a tongue tip. I'm not into kissing, least of all French-kissing, but I put the larger Herman head lip-to-lip with mine - for science! - and decided that not only was the mouth area too small, but the nose was too close, resulting in nose squashing no matter what the angle. Moreover, from even having touched the silicone with my lips, I retained a taste like having licked the inside of a bicycle tyre.
Which brings me to the silicone material: a total noob in this regard, I'd read that silicone has no taste or odour, but does discharge oil, and is tacky, and should be powdered. And I understood that, like anything fresh out of a chemical process, it may need to air for a bit. I'll say! After each handling of the doll, which I firmly squeezed all over to check for damage after its romp down the stairs, I washed my hands. The doll was supposed to go in the bedroom, but spent two days in the hall, with both front and back door open for the first few hours. I knew the bad smell was not part of the doll, as, after two days, the doll stunk less than the box it came in, which still exuded a chemical smell that made my throat itch, maybe from whatever fungicide or insecticide Chinese containers are sprayed with before being loaded. After a week, the doll had only a slight, sweet, rubbery, non-irritant scent.
This doll is made of the new softer silicone, which makes its feet too squashable to stand on. I'm going to be a bit critical of this new silicone. It was developed for the sake of realistically soft and jiggly breasts. But a ripped male body like the 170M should not, realistically, jiggle anywhere but in the privates, which are separate pieces and can be poured in a different softness, so the main body can be firmer. The upper body and limbs feel firm anyway due to the core and skeleton, but the hands and feet are, if anything, less realistic, the toes limply hanging away from the footplate when the legs are pointing up, and the fingers seemingly made of jelly, their nails bobbing on top as if about to come loose despite being firmly attached. I can also clearly feel the wire and plate through the fingers and hands, and am worried about damaging them. The feet are almost completely flat-soled, lacking a clear arch. All but the biggest toes on each foot are joined together for protection, a wise precaution with this soft silicone.
I ordered the doll with stiff joints, said to be good for posing, but also handy for carrying and dressing: lay doll on back (without head), point arms and legs straight up, wiggle sleeves over hands and trouser legs over feet, pull down over limbs, then lift shoulders and butt to slide clothes over main body. Here I ran into a problem: whereas all other joints were equally tight but movable, one hip joint was so tight that I had to lean my foot on the hip and then pull on the thigh with all my might, whereas the other hip joint was loose enough that the leg, when raised, tended to flop back down. Although falling down the stairs may have made this worse, this unequal tightening of hip joints happened during fabrication or transport, since I'd noticed the crotch being a bit asymmetrical the first time I pulled down the sleeping bag, with one leg accommodating the neutral crotch insert, and the other, not. To rotate the fragile hands, I followed a tip from a doll forum: bend hand 90 degrees at wrist (backwards or forwards, it doesn't matter), turn hand like lever, bend back. Turning the hand while straight on the wrist requires more force than I felt I could safely exert on the hands. The "skeleton" in the fingers is simply finger wires, which I leave alone as much as possible.
The neutral crotch insert came out with some careful pulling, but the limp male insert proved impossible to stuff in. I'd intended to forgo powdering (with cornstarch, as talcum irritates the lungs) but applied powder to the insert and body cavity, which made it slide in easily, and then, experimentally, put some on the chest. Oh, the luxurious feel of powdered silicone! A powder brush would have been better, but I just shook cornstarch into my hand and rubbed all over the body, getting powder everywhere and having to clean up the excess with a vacuum cleaner. Then I dressed the doll in old clothes that didn't fit me any more, all of which happened to be in a shade of beige, pulled soft boots over the feet for protection, and popped on one of the heads. To avoid more lash damage, I gave both heads old reading glasses that I'd found lying around, which suited them unexpectedly well. Finally, I wormed the doll onto a thin foam mattress, with tiny pillows under the thighs and the small of the back to ease pressure on the backside, and threw the sleeping bag over it as a dust cover.
When a company that thus far produced only female dolls, comes out with a male doll, an obvious question is: did the company design an anatomically correct male, or just use the female skeleton and basic body shape, but with a flat chest? The 170M body looks anatomically correct (and I'm not referring to the inserts) but has a relatively short upper body, and oversized thighs. It also has graceful, narrow, refined-looking hands, although these are in keeping with the minute appearance (despite measurements and musculature) of the body, and not necessarily "feminine". The male and female inserts fit into the same body cavity, so I conclude that both male and female dolls do use the same skeleton, but the skeleton is relatively gender-neutral, and any resulting anatomical inaccuracies are not glaring.
Of the two male inserts, the limp one also suffers the soft silicone's inability to keep its shape: in front, the penis is pulled away from the body by its own weight. The strip behind is jammed between the legs, but will also move around. (Warning: in flipping up the penis to get a view of how the rest was positioned, I tore the silicone a little. It's too limp to stay firmly attached, yet not limp enough to be pointed in any direction but down.) If I'd managed to get the insert into the cavity without powdering, maybe the tackiness of the silicone would have sealed body and insert together. Or, if I'd ordered pubic hair, it would have camouflaged both the gap and the abrupt change in colouring between both parts. The erect insert, being stiff, does not leave this gap.
A final question would be: how does it perform? This is one I can't answer, as my health doesn't allow for "performance", and I bought the doll for visual pleasure. And, it turns out, tactile pleasure, as some details are too subtle to appreciate visually: the tiny dimple in the middle of the navel, the wrinkles on the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet, the slight webbing between the fingers, the lines on top of the finger joints. The six-pack abs don't feel as glaringly bunchy as they look, and while the upper legs are a bit overdone, the arms and lower legs are perfectly shaped. In all, this doll is a nice piece of work.
The customer also sent me a bunch of pictures which I'm attaching to this posting:
.
or similar tools are highly recommended to protect your privacy when posting pictures or other content with embedded metadata online.
Many thanks to A.C. for this thorough review!
