Dimensions, Scale, and Visualization

It definitely does get easier with time!

I remember when I was about to order my first doll I looked up his height and made a line on a sheet of paper and I was pretty shocked.
60cm looked HUGE to me. I just imagined something like a solid block of 60cm height!
However, I still went with it and was actually very surprised how...dainty and "small" he was, because while he was 60cm in height you do not really get a lot of doll to speak.
The arms and legs are pretty thin, there's a lot of free space etc., and lots of the height is just legs.
I mean, he was small to me, I know to some SD is a killer but MSDs personally felt waaay too small to me I want them to have some "presence" to speak, and feel less like small play things.

After having seen and hold a few dolls you get a feeling for how big they are just by glancing at the measurements.
Owning just a head does not help much, because even among the same body height you can have very differently sized heads.
I mostly have 70cm dolls and their heads go from 7-8inch circumference to nearly 9-10inch.

In case you don't know it yet, the Comparison Heaven is helpful to compare dolls of different sizes with each other:
| Comparison Heaven and Dollection blog

 

Doll meets and conventions are great for this. To see a range of different sizes in one place really can help.

 

I also have trouble visualizing the size of these dolls. I think because they are so expensive, I somehow expect them to be more enormous and eye-catching in real life than they actually are, despite the measurements listed on the websites. I like the idea of having a large doll but, I wonder if I would end up thinking the size is a nuisance. I bought an MSD-sized doll as my first doll, in part, to help me determine whether or not I would like a larger one.

 

I use pictures online. I have been lucky to find comparisons of the dolls I wanted to see side by side. If I couldn't, I would ask a friend if they could help. It is really hard at first. And I had trouble with metrics too. I'm getting faster with it though! You will get there too!!!

 

Finding friends was a little hard. I was lucky to have a bjd con nearby so I used that to meet people and see tons of dolls! I have some anxiety so it wasn't easy but I made a few great friends!

 

Hybridizing is hard, even with experience. It's not just the size of the head vs. body, but neck length, shoulder width, sculpt style and so on. Sadly, sometimes it's just trial and error.

Even after all these years, I'm still surprised by the size of their things-- especially furniture and shoes!

 

Some cons are pretty small. And my community does tiny meetups so that also helps. I started by awkwardly saying hello to someone outside before seeing tons of people. That relaxed me a lot.

 

Good luck! There are tons of fun panels too so I hope that you get to see tons of dolls!

 

I get confused with the scales, like 1/3, 1/6, 1/12.... it's like a lot of the dolls are in cm, but the clothes and wigs are listed in the scales. I gotta figure out which is which ​

 

When I was new to the hobby, it was very hard to visualize it. When choosing my first doll, I had never seen a BJD in person before, so I went by measurements. SD (roughly 60cm) looked HUGE to me, too much to handle. YoSD (roughly 27cm) seemed Barbie size and not worth the money, considering the wide variety of cheap fashion dolls and baby dolls available. I ended up choosing MSD for my first, because that size is roughly the same height as American Girl, so I thought I had a good idea of what the doll would be like. I was so surprised when I opened his box and found that while height was similar, everything else was way off! He was so much smaller overall--thinner, more delicate, with a much smaller head. My sister got her first doll, 60cm, a week later and because of the overall proportions, he didn't seem that big to me at all. The first time I saw a YoSD in person, I was impressed at how much it didn't look like a cheap toy, but an equally nice doll, just smaller scale. All of that was very hard to imagine without having seen it in person. Same with imagining wigs, eyes, shoes, etc. I thought one size difference in a wig wouldn't matter much, then realized it can make the difference in the wig not going on at all, or being so big it covers the ears! One eye size up or down can sometimes make the difference in huge gaps on the side or not fitting in the eye well at all.

Luckily, experience does make a big difference! Now, I've gotten so used to different measurements and general sizes, I can usually just glance at a body and know if it can work for a head, or if I want a height difference in my dolls, I can imagine what 56cm looks like next to 62cm, for example. It does get better! I don't think anybody can fully envision these dolls until they get to handle a few different ones first.

 

Sometimes it's hard for me to visualize how big or small a doll is until I see them in person. I didn't realize just how tiny and fiddily a Real Puki is until I got one. Actually, I couldn't visualize the size of bigger dolls until I went to my first meet-up. Some of the scales of things and the names different doll companies use can be confusing too. "Mini" usually means 40-45cm, but Soom's Mini Gem line are 28-30cm tall. One thing that I found confusing is that "1/6" does not have a reliable meaning. A 30cm (about 1 foot) tall child is not the same scale as an adult the same size, yet I've seen companies call both 1/6.

My second doll originally seemed to work with my first, but as my collection grew she was obviously out of scale with everyone else. It bothered me so much that she has since gone on to a new home.

 

100% feel your pain. Spatial reasoning has never been my particular forte.

I have a slightly better sense of the overall scale of things now that I at least have a head in my possession (it was way smaller than I expected it to be!) but looking at numbers and knowing what to expect is still difficult. I’m like 99.5% sure that when I order a doll it will be on the Supia single jointed body, so I’ve been trying to use those measurements to make her an apron, but until she arrives to try it on, I feel like I’m still half blind guessing.