All Dolled Up

INTERVIEW:CURLED SNUGLY IN her infant car seat in the corner of Glenda Ewart's livingroom in Castlerock, Co Derry, little Caren is the very image of a newborn baby. She weighs 5lb 6oz. Her big, dark blue eyes stare out intently; her tiny wrists are tightly wrinkled; her downy hair lies in wisps over her ears. She even smells like a newborn, that characteristically sweet, talcum-rich scent. You almost expect to see her breathing. But you won't. Because Caren is an incredibly realistic fake.

Reborn dolls, or living dolls, exert a strange fascination; they have a hyper-real quality that is almost beyond perfection. The product of weeks or months of meticulous effort on the part of doll sculptors such as Ewart, each individually crafted doll is sold to its new owner, box-fresh and swathed in tissue paper, complete with its own “rebirth” certificate. Most are bought by collectors, few are left to sit gathering dust on the shelf. Rather, reborn owners seem to see themselves as adoptive mothers, sometimes placing the fake babies in specially created nurseries, and even taking them for walks where strangers – fooled by the reborn’s all-too-plausible appearance – often coo and fuss over the doll.

There was an incident in Australia where frantic police smashed the window of a locked vehicle to rescue a seemingly unconscious baby – which turned out, on closer examination, to be a reborn. More poignantly, and controversially, reborns are sometimes used therapeutically with women who have experienced stillbirths or miscarriages.

Ewart started to make reborns six years ago, when she was pregnant with her youngest child. She fell into doll sculpting by accident, only discovering the existence of the flourishing global reborn community while searching for baby clothes on the internet. Ewart found she had a special aptitude for the fine, fiddly work needed to transform a blank-faced vinyl doll into an uncannily accurate fake baby.

“I find it easy,” she says, looking down almost maternally at her latest creation, “but other people do find it difficult. I probably spend too much time on each one, but I really enjoy every moment of it. It’s all about creating one of a kind, not churning them out on a conveyor belt. Besides, I’m the mum of three boys, so I love getting the chance to go out shopping for tiny baby girl clothes.” Ewart sells her dolls to buyers around the world, from the US to Belgium and Austria. Recently, she created a “custom” facsimile for an Australian grandmother who wanted a tangible record of her grandson, now aged five, as a tiny infant.

How does she work her magic? Ewart, who was employed as a chef before becoming a doll sculptor, starts with a cellophane-wrapped pack consisting of a doll head and limbs: these are the basic building blocks of the reborn trade. A glue gun is used to seal the limbs, and glass or metal beads are added to the soft body form, as well as to the head, to give it a convincing weight. Then dozens of layers of flesh-coloured paint must be applied to create the distinctively mottled appearance of newborn skin. Ewart uses a variety of fine brushes and scraps of sea sponge to achieve her effects, which include milk spots and “stork bites”.

Caren, who will sell for around £500 (around €500), even has the trace of a tear, glistening under one eye. (How do you get that convincing wet look? “Paper glue,” says Ewart.) As for the distinctive newborn smell, she achieves that by dabbing scent on the reborn’s nappy. Many reborns are styled as premature babies, or “preemies”, in the language of the trade, and Ewart says she prefers creating them, because the detailing is more demanding, with delicate veins showing through the near-translucent skin.

The baby is then baked in the oven to set the paints, before the painstaking process of rooting the hair begins. Ewart lifts a half-finished infant head from a baking tray on her mantelpiece (where it had been sitting rather incongruously among the family photographs) showing me how each strand of fine angora mohair hair must be individually micro-rooted, using a special needle device. More than 20,000 strands are required, and the eyelashes are attached the same way. It’s clear that patience is needed just as much as skill.

All this adds up to one seriously realistic doll. But for ultimate lifelike veracity, more and more doll sculptors are adding extra accessories to their creations. Caren, for instance, has a magnetic dummy which attaches to a magnetic implant behind her lips, so she appears to be sucking it herself. Hair bows can be attached the same way, with a magnet hidden in the head. According to Ewart, fake formula milk can be made from diluted fabric softener, and displayed in a teated bottle, if you want to pretend to feed your reborn. Other options include a heat pad, sewn into a pocket in the doll’s body, so it feels as warm as a human baby, and voice boxes, to mimic infant giggles or cries. Then there are the tummy inserts (to add that extra layer of chubbiness); the heartbeat units; and the fake spines (“feel the little vertebrae” enthuses the reborn supplies site). Strangest of all, some “preemie” dolls even come in incubators with a breathing apparatus attached to their nose.

It’s not surprising that some people find reborns vaguely disquieting – creepy even – especially when they come complete with all their paraphernalia. It has been suggested that this is the “uncanny valley” hypothesis at work – the theory that when robots or other facsimiles of human beings become too lifelike, they induce a feeling of revulsion among human observers.

As for the reborn devotees themselves, some psychologists believe that they may experience the same rush of the hormone oxytocin that mothers experience when holding their newborn children. It would certainly go some way towards explaining the extraordinary emotional attachment that many reborn owners, mostly older women, seem to feel for their fake babies.

But Glenda Ewart thinks it’s even more straightforward than that. “The honest truth is that people just love cuddling babies. And that’s all there is to it.”

• See rebornbabybody.com