The extraordinary world of ‘re-borns’ – life-like baby dolls – and the women who buy them
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Sorry, you’ve caught me with my mouth fully open. Hugely agape actually. Catching snowflakes, bird shit, smoke… Anything that’s passing.
My face has remained iced for the duration of My Fake Baby, which telltales of a new industry in plastic dolls made to look and behave like living babies. The people who buy them push them around in buggies and wash their hair. The dolls are even customized to customers’ specifications: a cut on the knee, a red mark above the eyes, clenched hands… they can even be fitted with a breathing mechanism-thingy.
My Fake Baby explores the lives of women who spend hundreds, sometimes thousands of pounds on lifelike baby dolls known as “reborns”. Some have beating hearts and tiny veins. They are loved like real babies, cuddled and taken for walks. Doll designer Jaime – a mother of four – fulfils the dreams of other women by engineering babies to their specifications in her front room. Adoptive “mothers” include women whose children have grown up and left home and women unable to have children of their own. It would be easy to dismiss all this as sad, strange and just plain wrong, but it gives great comfort to those involved.
One lady, Sue, had quite a few reborns in a spookily beautifully kitted-out nursery. She couldn’t do with the noise of the real thing: “I want them well behaved and clean and the reality isn’t like that,” she said. She took her “children” for walks and even had a bottleholder for their formula (fabric conditioner, not milk). She spent nearly €400 on clothes for a new baby, Sophie, who she travelled to America to pick up. (my mouth is still open.)
“In her Kansas City home, Moore even has an elaborate room for the dolls. She organizes birthday parties, bakes a cake and even invites guests.”
If I was ever invited over to someone’s house for a fake baby birthday party, I’d call the looney bin to come lock that person up.
There’s nothing healthy going on there… a four year old girl, sure… a 49 year old woman, NOT.
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