BJD Hands ✦

There have been a few things I've had to get used to since transitioning to collecting BJDs from collecting vinyl dolls, and I think one of the biggest things for me is the lack of hands. My Obitsu and Azone dolls all have extra hands, although I'm not personally familiar with any BJD companies that offer 5+ different styles of hands. At most, I've seen something like "open hands" and "closed hands" styles.

I am in love with the dainty, poised hand styles though, and thankfully those are quite common among BJDs. I don't care how unnatural it looks- it's pretty!

 

Oh hands! I could go on for hours. Bad hands are a dealbreaker for me, but luckily I do my own blushing and aesthetics so matching a proper color for a new pair of hands to a doll is easy for me to do. Several of my dolls have hybrid hands. I adore them blushed, "still" or jointed, and I have plans to dye the fingertips of my most handled dolls with a pink tint to stop their color wearing off when it's merely blushing.

 

I have multiple sets of all the minifee hands because hands are awesome! I also have a pair of Volks SD-GR hands that I don't have a doll for but I love the shape of the hands so much I haven't been able to sell them.

 

Oh man, a large part of my love of minifees was for the many many hands! I have mainly dust of dolls and lillycat dolls now and as beautiful as the hands are I really wish they had the variety of hand sculpts and ease of swapping that the minifee magnet hands have!

 

The boy I just unboxed today came with free jointed hands, they're my first pair and I really like them! They're daintier than the ones his body normally comes with, and they're very finicky and sensitive, but they add SO much to him! I love the hands on my other boys, but I'll probably try to find some jointed hands for them, too, in the future. I've noticed things like certain detailing on hands I like or don't like, but I've never been like "Wow, these hands are NICE!" like I was when I got the jointed hands on my Sera and started posing them!

 

For me, the hands really mostly just need to be big enough! I realized years ago that I can't stand tiny hands on dolls, especially the guys. I've owned a few male dolls who, by default, had extremely delicate slender hands or stubby fingers, and I had to order different hands for them. On the average human, the length from bottom of the palm to tip of the middle finger is about the same as the length from the chin to the hairline. It's pretty rare to find dolls with hands that big, and I've seen several who barely reach from the chin to middle of the nose. I know it's partly due to most dolls having large heads, but it still bothers me if they're much too small.

I usually just like each doll to have a neutral set of hands, but Jack has a "thumbs up" hand that fits his character well, and Luc has a set of gun hands. Those fit him well, but were an impulse buy. He had a broken hand, and shipping from Luts was pretty high for just a basic replacement set, so I added in the gun hands with pistols to justify it.

 

The hand topic still drives me crazy. Normally, you get one pair of hands with a doll, and that's it. But fingers are meant to move and hold things. Sure you can cheat for fotos using white poster tac or rubber bands, but if you want to play with them (which I do), it is just annoying. Then it would be great to just have several sets of hands like Hot Toys figures have. Pop one off, pop one on - that's it. Though I might have found a working solution for easy hand switching, but I just don't hands which have really different positions. I might try to get several pairs of my favorite hands separately and change their positions with hot water.

I own several pairs of jointed hands from different companies. Some work fine, some are just horrible. By now, permanently twisting fingers drive me crazy. Maybe these are the way to go by modding them into different fixed positions...I don't know.

 

I have a pair of hands that have joints, but its pose is very limited... e.g. I tried to make a 'heart' , however the thumb is not working...

 

I've always been obsessed over doll hands. I need them to be large, small hands look so wrong, and I like lots of pretty detail. A generic pose is fine, but I really like "gesture" hands....CP used to make so many hands for their larger dolls but now they only do different hands for the smaller ones, so I have a stash of old CP Delf hands I use for some of my smaller SD sized dolls. Ringdoll just started making extra hands in multiple poses, and I have been buying those for some of my larger 70cm guys.
I love extra hands, I have boxes of them. Literal boxes. Because of all my extras, nice hands are a plus for me, but not a deal-breaker, because if I like the body and not the hands, I'll just switch them out with hands I do like! I like Jointed hands too, but only for dolls I think really need them (they are pricey and can get annoying). So far Soom jointed hands are the best of the ones I've had. They can do the most natural poses, and they hold their poses well. Also the thumb has the best movement of any I own.

I've started to become obsessed with feet the same way....but it's harder to hybrid feet onto a doll than it is hands....so so far ugly feet just get covered up with shoes....

 

I bought a few extra pairs but I tend not to use them except for one doll whose character uses a wand. I think it is too tedious to switch since I like a tight strung doll. I like the idea of magnet hands that are easy to switch.

I am not a big fan of how jointed hands look. It is too mechanical looking for me. I don't think I would use them except like on a character who wears gloves so I can get the posing but not have to look at so many joints.

I used to have a Magical Angel body and the body was fine for posing, but the anatomy was a little Barbie doll-ish with really bland looking hands.

I feel like bare minimum I need some like knuckle definition.

Dollshe 28m probably has the prettiest hands of the dolls I have owned.

 

@natsu82 Excellent try! Can you pose the elbows away from the sides of the body to help get the thumbs into the desired position?

 

I pretty snarky about hands. I think that they are a detail that is very important in pictures. Jointed hands are the best in my opnion. I think every doll should have two sets of hands. A normal relaxed set and a posed set. They don't have to be jointed if they look could pass most of the time.

 

natsu82, ist it your Gray? Nice to see your boy!

I'm personally totally in love with hands with veins, but they are usually made only for the biggest dolls.

 

Normally hands are meh, I don’t care, for me unless they are the paddle type -those just bug me to no end (I have a mature 1/6 doll who has them). But I recently got a Fairyland Realfee, and as I like the hands he came with (holding/heart ), I would really like to get a couple different pairs -except for the fact FL doesn’t have any other hand sculpts for Realfee for sale separately. The only time I do care, and it’s not available.