Character-specific tops for Friends mini-dolls

When the Friends theme started in 2012, the five main girls wore only character-specific tops, as I mentioned in a few of my posts. 

But clearly that was not an economical way to make mini-dolls. The more characters can wear the same design, the easier and cheaper it is to produce them. So character-specific torso designs are no longer prevalent. That way, everyone with the same skin tone and torso type can share the clothes!

While it's certainly fun for fans to mix and match mini-doll pieces, it's greatly disappointing for me to find Stephanie in an official Friends set wearing a shirt clearly designed for Emma.



Something like that would never happen in LEGO Elves; could you imagine Azari the fire elf in an official set wearing Naida's blue outfit with the water element symbol? That would be unacceptable!

It's too bad that the signature motifs are getting overlooked or simply ignored, and sometimes it doesn't seem to matter which symbol represents which character.

But that doesn't mean they have been completely given up. In 2015, when the signature style shirts got slightly updated, two of the characters started wearing their own favorite motifs again in some of their new outfits.

Stephanie wore her stars in 41106 Pop Star Tour Bus. And Olivia turned out to be very happy with her heart motif. You can see her proudly showing off one or more hearts in the following sets: 41090 Olivia's Garden Pool (2015), 41100 Heartlake Private Jet (2015) and in 41116 Olivia's Exploration Car (2016).

Below are the close-up images of some of the character-specific tops (not all!).

Andrea: musical note

Emma: flower



Mia: dog paw



Olivia: heart



Stephanie: star

Introduction to the minidoll legs

When I discuss the mini-dolls, my focus is often on what their face prints are or what they have on the torsos, and I may even forget to mention the legs.

But actually, it is quite fascinating to see how many different kinds of leg molds mini-dolls have!

As you may have noticed, every official mini-doll character is basically stuck with one type of torso.

It may look like there is a wide variety of upper body options for young female mini-dolls, but they are all made from the one and only girl torso mold.

What makes these torsos look different is just the colors and the prints, and not the variety in torso molds.



By contrast, the leg parts do not rely on the colors and print details alone.

It's amazing how many different shapes there are!



In some of my future posts, I will talk about some of these individual leg mold.