It’s freezing outside, there’s a thin
layer of snow on the ground and I’m sitting by the window like a 5-year
old looking out for Santa to bring her a Barbie. Well, I’m a bit older
than that and I’m awaiting a courier, not Santa, but the anticipation is
the same and well … he’s to bring me a Barbie. I’ve waited a long time
for Cool Looks Barbie whom I purchased from a lady form Illinois over
two weeks ago and I’ve checked her progress with alarming regularity
about twice a day and at long last she sure came, my Neon Queen! My
Barbie’s previous owner has taken her out of the box, but she arrived in
it and the doll, her outfit and her accessories were in a very good
condition.
Although the box doesn’t indicate that,
Cool Looks was produced in 1990 in collaboration with Toys’r’us as their
special edition and a single doll, no friends to accompany her. On the
surface she may look like a very much generic doll, and her being the
“special edition” is not at all impressive. Just another doll for
another chain of stores. But to me she’s very special, and a long
awaited, top-five-doll because I used to own her once as a child when my
family from NY bought her for me along with some clothes and sweets and
before putting them all in a cardboard box, they photographed the goods
and placed the photo amongst them and I’ve recently found the
photograph but I didn’t really need it, I remembered Cool Looks Barbie
very well. For a doll wanted as much as this I was willing to wait a
little longer with the purchase, but I decided to bring it forward as
with Toys’r’us closing business their exclusives have been getting a lot
of attention lately and this may in short time be reflected by their
prices. So my classic 80s had to wait for their turn.
Mattel gave my Barbie a very sweet,
innocent look, an adorable, smiling face. Some other dolls share the
same facepaint of her eyes because Mattel can be repetitive at times,
and I’ve seen such happy looking eyes several times already, Western
Fun, Capri and Cute’n Cool have them too. But it’s easy to tell my Cool
Looks from them, she lacks the green triangle in her eyes and her
lipstick is very dark. There’s a tiny paint chip by the way, but I’m
still pleased with the doll. Her hairdo is pretty unique and it looks
like her hair stylists couldn’t make up their minds and were torn
between crimps and curls so they gathered her hair in two asymmetrical
pigtails, crimped one of them and curled the other one plus they gave
her the bushy bangs. Pretty interesting indeed.
For a generic doll, her outfit is really
well put together and consists of as many as 5 separate pieces and not 4
as her box informs us, but anyway, you can mix and match them as you
wish. The colors of her outfit are vivid, crazy neon apart from her vest
that’s black with green polka dots and colorful music notes all over
it. Under the vest, there’s an orange t-shirt with a decal and a plastic
snap and I remembered the plastic snap so clearly, I must have hated
the vile Velcro since early childhood. Under the t-shirt there’s a
surprise – a short green top. In the 90s it was high fashion to wear
short leggings and a skirt together and Barbie followed that fashion of
course. The leggings are not very interesting but the skirt is great - a
cascade of orange and pink frills and a yellow plastic detail that I
remembered equally well. Strange, how your brain registered the tiny
details while I forgot the way Barbie’s hair was styled or her facepaint
altogether. She’s also wearing simple pink sneakers that discolored her
feet slightly and hot pink geometrical jewelry that I’ve also seen
somewhere else, Style Barbie perhaps?
Cool Looks also comes well accessorized
and these were put in a plastic bag by a Malaysian hand and glued to the
inner cardboard and so they remained for 28 years until I took them out
and decorated them with the stickers that were still in the box. But
before I did that, I stopped for a minute and wondered about this little
plastic bag and decided that I’m really fond of the lazy, imperfect way
Mattel once displayed a doll’s accessories in the box. Now every tiny
piece is placed in a clear box in an orderly way so you can see them all
easily. That’s fine and I like the esthetics, but there’s no surprise
and I remember how I enjoyed discovering what curious little things my
doll came with. But anyway, her accessories include a journal, a pen, a
phone, a can with something to drink, a triangle alarm clock for some
inexplicable reason and a round hat case sort of bag to store some of
it. I’ve seen such accessories before, Teen Time Skipper and Cute’n Cool
Barbie had them too. One of the pictures comes from the ebay auction
because I opened the plastic bag before taking any pictures.
For a 90’s doll you would expect her to
come with her classic Barbie brush, but instead she was given a comb
that once belonged to the Spectra and the Shimmerons doll line. Spectra
and 4 of her friends were released in 1987 (produced in 1986) only to be
discontinued a year later. Spectra was a happy looking doll with pink
hair and heavy make-up dressed all in lace. She was actually an alien
that came from the planet called Shimmeron, her body had the
articulation of the Bend and Move type and it was made of a strange,
metallic looking, shiny plastic, her head was the regular, skin toned
vinyl. It looks like the consumers were not ready for Spectra and her
gang and she sure was ahead of her times, but right now the dolls are
highly appreciated by collectors worldwide and the dolls themselves as
well as their fashion packs, accessory packs and a single playset tend
to be very expensive. But back then it looks like Mattel had a stock of
combs they produced for discontinued dolls so they put them where they
could and so my Barbie comes with one.
I knew it would be a very long entry,
but what can I do when the doll is so magical to me that even a simple
comb is worth a separate paragraph. My doll may be hardly recognizable,
not at all appreciated, but for me she holds some very happy memories
and she’s one of the dolls from my childhood that I really wanted to own
again. Now, I’m only missing the United Colors of Benneton Barbie, but
this girl is unfortunately very much popular and hard to get in good
shape and for a decent price so it may take me some time, but I hope
that sooner or later, she’ll join Cool Looks and Super Star 1988 and the
rest of my collection.
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