all doll categories to choose from
Before you ever compare faces, there is a category decision that settles more than people expect. Our catalog holds 419 models as of this summer. They sort, with less argument than you might think, into five stock groups plus one styling tradition that runs across all of them.
The five groups descend from the full size female bodies, which take up four fifths of everything we stock, down through the male line, then the compact formats, plus the accessory shelf. Elf and anime styling is the sixth presence on the floor, a look that shows up on whichever models the factory decided to style that way. Sixteen of our model names carry it openly. The rest of the lineup stays photoreal.
The groups line up naturally by size, because each step down the ladder trades size for convenience in fairly predictable steps. The ledger below holds our own stock counts.
The blow up doll problem
Half the hesitation around this product line traces back to a gag that has been running for decades. The inflatable doll of the joke shop era, welded from the same PVC as a beach ball and sold with a smirk, spent the eighties standing in for the entire idea, in comedies like Airplane! and in a thousand bachelor party photos afterward. That joke had a real product behind it, a vinyl shell priced at beer money that usually failed at the seams within a few uses.
A cast doll shares little more than the name with that prop. The real gap between sex dolls and blow up dolls runs through weight, anatomy, price and lifespan. It stays wide on every one of them. The weight alone usually settles the question, given that a cast body starts around thirty kilograms. Even confident buyers get something from the comparison, if only the vocabulary, since a lot of product page terminology exists to mark the distance from vinyl. Lifespan splits just as wide, because a decent cast doll is a multi year object.
Structurally the products differ just as much. Every one of these categories shares a cast polymer body with a posable steel skeleton inside it, plus the materials paperwork legitimate factories publish batch by batch, whatever the format’s size. A 90 centimeter torso ships with batch documentation identical in kind to a full figure’s.
Full size dolls
Full size female dolls are where the industry puts its effort. Our split is typical of the trade at 337 models out of 419, and shopping a lane that deep is a different experience from browsing a boutique with twelve. A catalog this wide has to serve first buyers and returning collectors at once, which also explains the pricing spread.
Heights climb from 150 centimeters to 178 across two dozen rungs, each rung carrying its own weight class and its own presence in a room. Body types spread from slim silhouettes through a dozen BBW figures in our lineup alone, with athletic cuts and half a dozen mature styled faces filling out stretches of the range that barely existed five years ago. Faces move across regional sculpting traditions, from western features to asian, latina and deep toned ebony work that takes real skill to paint. Cup letters span the whole run from A to H. Head makeup arrives natural or heavy on top of everything else, according to the sculptor’s brief. Age styling adds one more choice, from collegiate faces to mature sculpts styled to look mid thirties and up. Multiply those axes together and even a conservative count of the combinations passes ten thousand before anyone mentions clothing. No showroom carries all of that in person. Filters are how anyone gets through it. Open tabs pile up fast in a lane this deep, taking whole weekends with them. Where should a first buyer even begin? What to look at in a full size doll follows a sensible order, height first and face last, the order a buyer should shop in.
Our own shelf shows the crowding clearly. The busiest rung on the height ladder is 164 centimeters, where 67 different models stand. The reason is practical: that height looks fully adult, at a weight a person can manage on stairs. Just over three quarters of the lane stands inside the 158 to 168 band, whatever the tall doll photography suggests. Past 170 our stock thins to seventeen models, all of them heavy enough to need two people at the door.
Budget does not decide everything here either. The lane prices from about $1,400 to $5,780 in our catalog, and the lower half of that spread draws on the full variety, because factories reuse body molds across price tiers. What sets the tier is the skin material together with the finishing hours poured into paint and detail. Listing pages keep that tier logic quiet, so a shared body can show up twice at two prices with nothing to explain the difference except a materials line and a paint description. The lower tier sells many of those bodies with plainer paint.
Two evenly priced models can differ on six axes at once, and none of that shows in a thumbnail. Height narrows the field fastest, hundreds down to dozens in one move.
Male dolls and custom requests
Male dolls occupy 34 rows of our catalog. A tenth of the shelf. Honestly, that ratio is nothing to brag about, our own shelf included. The wider industry looks no different on this point. Male frames are broader through the shoulders, heavier at equal height. Our male shelf runs from 162 centimeters to 190, with the crowd gathered at 170 or 176. Weights span 38 to 65 kilograms. That bracket starts past the female lane’s median. Face choice is thinner than anyone would like, too.
The buyer mix skews differently as well. Support questions in that lane run toward hardware first. Wardrobe support thins out over there, a small detail with real consequences on delivery day, when a 176 centimeter frame turns out to wear sizes no doll boutique stocks. Ordinary menswear departments end up covering the gap. The weight math, the short face menu and the mounting hardware nobody explains on a product page are what set the male doll line apart from the default body.
Off to the side of both lanes, custom work covers all the requests that no dropdown lists, from trans body configurations to plus size frames on reinforced skeletons. Factories treat these as engineering jobs; the bulk of them involve tooling decisions. One request gets refused at every reputable shop, the photo based copy of a real person who never consented. That refusal holds at any budget. When the standard lanes don’t fit, the conversation moves over to custom special requests.
None of these niches moves mainstream volume, so factories tool them conservatively, in small mold runs that explain both the thin menus and the waits. Quotes measured in months are normal at that end of the trade. The waits come from tooling schedules.
Torsos, partials and heads
Torsos are the answer to floor space and lifting strength, the two things that rule out more purchases than taste does. Dropping the limbs takes a third or more off the weight of a comparably built figure, and it shortens the storage problem by half a meter. Our own ten run large as the format goes, 90 or 100 centimeter builds at 25 or 32 kilograms, with a full internal skeleton through the hips. Elsewhere in the market, smaller hip and chest formats drop far below that mark.
We stock exactly ten of them against a wall of 337 full size figures, a small enough sample that generalizations deserve a grain of salt. That ratio says less about demand than about how recently the format matured. Whether a torso is the smarter choice turns on square meters and kilograms more than on the price difference. That page runs the numbers for purchase day and for year two, resale included. Torso pricing on our shelf runs $879 to $1,099, all of it below where the full size lane begins.
The catalog keeps going below torsos, into sex doll partial products, hip and breast pieces that trade one more layer of realism for something far easier to hide, plus a five minute wash. Buyers use them as first steps, or just as what fits the storage they have. Pricing in that corner dips below the torso band. Our own shelf stays thin there for now. Down another step, the partial pieces border on the sleeve and stroker market.
Standalone heads hold seven rows of our stock list, sold sometimes as replacements and sometimes as upgrades for a body already owned. The neck hardware has to match the body’s bore. Bore sizing varies from factory to factory, so a head bought on looks alone can arrive unable to mount its intended body. Buying a head for a body you have not chosen yet deserves a seller chat first.
Anime and fantasy
Realism stops being the goal in this wing, and the judging rules change with it. Sixteen of our female models carry the look openly, from Dahlia’s elf ears at 153 centimeters to Zoe’s anime face at 165. The wider market goes further, into blue and violet skins and heads drawn from comic panels. The different world of anime and fantasy dolls has its own rules, including paint work no realistic doll would wear and the copyright line that keeps famous characters out of every legitimate catalog. Silicone dominates here for a plain manufacturing reason. Unnatural skin tones and crisp anime lines hold better in a material that takes paint at pore level detail. Cosplay works as the wing’s second economy. Costume sets with colored wigs sell alongside the dolls themselves. Factories support mixing, an anime head over a realistic body, through the shared neck hardware. Buyers here know exactly what they want. They watch the release cycles the way sneaker buyers do. Short paint runs mean scarcity later, visible on the resale boards.
The accessory shelf
Accessories fill 31 rows of our catalog, a share that starts to make sense once the crate is gone and the actual owning begins. Wig care is one set of problems the sales page never mentions. Storage cases and lifting straps answer a heavier set, the kind that surfaces the first time a doll needs to move between floors without a second pair of hands. Both problems show up in month one.
Some of the shelf earns its keep within the first week. The rest waits for a specific day, the heating rod for the first cold month, the repair kit for an accident that may never happen. Cold climate owners tend to put the rod in the first order. What belongs in that first order and what can wait is the question that runs straight through what’s out there in accessories, arrival essentials on one side and later comforts on the other.
Entry pricing is shallow, tens of dollars per item for jewelry, glasses and cleaning tools. The big tickets concentrate in storage plus transport, where a wheeled case reaches $900 in our catalog.
Our model pages carry the three body numbers next to the price (height, weight, cup). Those numbers govern the accessory aisle too. They decide what wardrobe fits and whether the storage case closes. Wardrobe tends to grow into its own budget line for owners who photograph their dolls. Spending there can outrun the doll’s own upkeep, by the owners’ own accounting in The Doll Forum wardrobe threads.
Room, stairs, storage
Every lane runs into the same practical questions. The bigger the doll, the louder they get. A private room with a lockable door opens the whole catalog, from the 190 centimeter male build to the heaviest BBW figure. Shared flats narrow the field toward the compact formats. Anyone who moves apartments often should think about the crate first. A forty kilogram box is a lot to move. Doubly so on moving day.
For weight, our full size females center somewhere near 38 kilograms. Males run 38 to 65. Our two torso builds are 25 and 32. A bare head is about two kilograms. Crates add several kilograms more on top of each of those figures.
The storage side runs on similar lines. A full size figure needs standing closet space over a meter and a half. Torsos lie along one deep shelf at 90 centimeters. Partial pieces fit in an ordinary drawer. Crates run longer than the doll by a hand’s width, wider by two, so check the hallway corner against that before committing to the mainstream lane.
Keeping the doll hidden is the point nobody likes discussing. Compact formats owe a real share of their popularity to it. The product photography rarely admits as much. A cased torso raises no questions during an apartment inspection.
What to settle first
Category is the first decision, one that deserves more time than people give it. Price won’t sort the lanes for you; receipt totals overlap from one category to the next. The useful sorting questions are physical ones. Stairs, lifting strength, who else has a key to the room. Every one of those is cheaper to answer before the crate ships than after it arrives, and hygiene rules keep returns narrow everywhere in this category; a wrong lane usually cannot be undone with a refund.
Pick the lane first, and give the face its own separate evening later.
