San Angelo's Reborn Baby Market

Wendy Resnikoff’s family doesn’t necessarily look forward to coming home and finding baby doll heads in the oven, but over the past 11 years they’ve gotten used to it, she said.

“It softens the vinyl so you can root it,” she explained, holding up a nearly-completed doll and showing the hairline. Looking closely, one could see where small clusters of hair penetrated the plastic scalp in even, tightly-spaced rows.

“I paint the insides of their entire body,” she continued. “I don’t paint the head until I’ve rooted it. I order new eyes; I drill into the nose so that it’s got the open [nostrils]. Then I fill them up with blue sand to kind of help that blue come through the skin. I draw on the veins; I paint everything.”

The professional photographer and mother of four first started making “reborn” dolls back in 2003 after she discovered one on eBay. She’d been searching for lifelike dolls to give to her daughters and was struck with the realism of the reborns.

“When I first started doing research on the dolls, a lot of what started with them was people who would sit there and they’d make them for grieving parents, parents who had lost infants and so forth,” Resnikoff explained. “It gives them an opportunity to, I guess, cope or have something there. A lot of them will put their child’s first onesie [on the doll].”

Facial features, hair and eye color and even the length and weight of the doll are made to match the infant they are modeled after, oftentimes tediously worked until they mirror a photograph provided by the parents.

“It’s not super hard if it’s a general baby face,” she said of the process. “Now if they’re going to give me a scrunchy nose and say, ‘hey, can you replicate this?’ that’s when it gets a little tough because you’re having to heat and mold and heat and mold because that vinyl doesn’t stay like it’s supposed to without being severely heated without burning.”

In order to be sure she can make the doll as real as possible without burning through materials, Resnikoff generally requests a more simple picture of the baby without excess wrinkles and skin folds, since they can be difficult to duplicate.  

Precision and accuracy are paramount, she explained, especially if the doll is going to a grieving mother who has just lost her child.

“If there’s a birthmark up here on the forehead, you’re going to try to match that birthmark perfect, you know. Same with a mole, or just whatever,” she said. “Matching the eye color is probably the hardest. It’s a hit and miss.”

Once she has the image of a baby, she said, she begins looking for a mold with similar features and orders the materials piece-by-piece. Depending on the age, alertness and expression on the baby’s face, Resnikoff might find the initial doll at any of a number of retail stores and outlets, which she then completely disassembles and rebuilds with meticulous detail.

On average, she spends about two weeks working on a doll from onset to completion, and sets her prices based upon the price of the doll, materials and man-hours put into to each project. Most of them sell for $100-150, she said.

“Generally, I will weight them with glass sand, which runs right at about $50 for a 10-pound bag,” she said. “I try to get them to weigh the amount that their kid weighed. I’ll get it as close as possible without overdoing it. But my biggest issue is getting them the right length. If they’re 19 ¾, I’ll tell them I can get 19 ½, but I can’t guarantee 19 ¾ [inches].”

Not all of her reborns are created for grieving parents, but Resnikoff estimates that some 40 percent of them are, and those are the ones that typically come with back-stories.

Hearing what the doll will mean to someone who has lost a child makes the experience even more meaningful for her, she said, but admitted that sometimes she does hear strange stories as well.

“I had one lady email me and I guess she had five or six reborns and her kids had been taken away because she was mentally unstable…and she went to buying reborns,” Resnikoff recalled. “Until one day—I guess her mental disability was pretty severe—and they swatted her door because they (neighbors) watched her carry a car seat into the house and they thought it was a real infant in the house.  They (police) broke down her door and found dolls all over the house…she had nurseries and everything set up for them.”

The realism of the dolls has caused similar reactions locally, Resnikoff said, who has more than once been publicly confronted about leaving her “baby” in the car or not putting it in the proper child-safety seat.

“It’s habit when you’re carrying these dolls because they’re weighted—especially if you’re a mom—to throw them over your shoulder and sit there and pat their butts while you’re walking through the store,” she said. “I tend to take them with me when I’m looking for outfits and stuff.

“My son walked in carrying one by the arm one day and this guy flipped out. My youngest daughter used to put hers in a stroller and we’d have to bring the stroller with us every time we went into Walmart. She’d push it in her baby stroller and I had one lady [say], ‘Look, she’s pushing her baby sister!’”

The shopping experiment has become a sort of final test for the dolls, Resnikoff laughed, adding that she doesn’t want to sell something that doesn’t look real.

Currently, she is taking orders for reborn dolls via telephone and Facebook, where she has set up shop under the name Enchanted Nursery Reborns. Resnikoff charges a $50 deposit per order to cover the initial costs, and does primarily infants and babies, but can do toddlers as well at a slightly elevated price. She also makes reborns for children who want a lifelike doll to play with. They are more sturdy than the non-play dolls are not as heavy, she said.

"It’s a lot of fun," she said. "It’s kind of like being a painter…you’re given a canvas, and not any one of these looks exactly the same…you’re getting a one-of-a-kind [piece]."