Faceblindness

That's a good point, I use bodylanguage and voice to indentify people much of the time. But for the dolls I can look for things like the angles and relations between the corners of the mouth and eyes as well as the angle and curve of the mouth and the edges of the eyes. Also, for dolls I don't have to worry about making them uncomfortable by staring at them while trying to figure them out.

 

I'm not face blind so I cannot speak to that experience but I do often find myself thinking a lot of dolls are very same faced to me.

I've always been attracted to dolls with completely inhuman heads both in my action figure collecting hobby and in bjd. I've recently started experimenting with 3d printed/resin animal skulls for heads on bjd and one of my absolute favorite dolls has the West nile Christopher head sculpt by SimplyDivine. I've also always wanted a doll with tv for a head Lol. I don't know how you feel about fantasy sculpts but they may be something to look into if you want dolls that are very easy to tell apart.

 

lol "Sorcery!" is probably right. Yes that is me. I may have seen them in a minor role but I seem to remember them. But then again I can seemingly forgot what I needed to do or why i went downstairs.
TBH I don't seem to understand how people can tell the difference in face sculpts but then again I am really new to this hobby so I am very unfamiliar with the companies. Maybe one day I might be able to.

 

Like several others here, I've never been diagnosed with face blindness, but I've often wondered if I partially suffer from it. I recognize close friends and family and others I see very often, but I have trouble picturing faces in my head, like if I'm reading a book, I can't imagine the faces of the characters at all, and if I see a casual acquaintance outside of where I normally see them, I often don't speak because I'm unsure if it's someone I know or not.

Anyway, with dolls, I think it depends entirely on the doll/company to me. I tend to like dolls that stand out to me or have unusual traits that make them more unique to me. I won't name names, but there are a lot of sculpts from certain companies that all look extremely similar to me, to the point I can't even guess what company made them. Child dolls are the worst to me because despite company or sculpt, pretty much all 1/6 dolls have the same "round face with big eyes, tiny nose and mouth" face to me. This is a big part of why tinies don't appeal to me. Faceups make a big difference to me, and this again may be why I don't care for default faceups or typical doll-like faceups. I don't like to ever have the same sculpt or body for any of my dolls, and I like a range in heights and body types and resin colors. The more diversity I have in my crew, the less they suffer from "sameness".

 

I don't have face blindness, but I do have mental blindness (though it's improving... slowly. I went from having a vivid imagination to not being able to see a color if you asked me to). Imagining what I want dolls to look like with eyes, wigs, clothes, colors etc is nearly impossible. For a while I stopped sending my dolls to faceup artists entirely because I just couldn't think or describe how I wanted them to look. I have the concept of a thing in my head at most - not the image.

I can almost always recognize a face but I cannot for the life of me remember things attached to it - not even personality.

With dolls that are static and don't move and come blank... the doll hobby has been interesting lol

 

Oh yes. To me all Fairyland, Luts etc sculpts are the same. And Iplehouses all look like each other. I do not have them because it feels like owning just any doll.

I am faceblind to the point that it sometimes restricts the movies I can watch. If there are two or more male characters in a movie or a video game with similar hair and skin colours (dark haired white man is the worst scenario), I cannot make anything out of the plot because every time the clothes swap I keep messing the people and I have no idea who is on whose side and what is everybody trying to do. Women are a bit easier thanks to more unique clothing and hairstyles, but men... no hope! When we watch a movie together, my man sometimes has to explain the plot to me, because I see some characters as other characters and never recognize who was lying dead in that scene they showed for 2 seconds etc. Especially those agent movies that my man likes, where there are a bunch of middle aged white men running around in similar black suits, are horrible.

 

Exactly, Sometimes I wonder if it is all the same person in the movie. It is very frustrating. Various expressions on dolls is so important to me for that reason. They have to be different because there is no point in owning a bunch of dolls with the same face.

 

I also struggle with face blindness so blank sculpts are difficult for me fo tell apart, especially if they are the same company (Fairyland is the worst for me). Thar why I tend to like more unique sculpts and artists, the bolder the design the more it stands out. I tend not to like sculpts until I've seen what someone has done with them before. I've also found that when I see dolls in different shades of resin (be it a darker brown, paper white, or green) they tend to make the sculpt stand out in my mind a little better.

If you find yourself coming back to sculpts that are already on your list I'd say that a pretty good sign that you subconsciously like something about it. Once you get a doll you can style or mod it however you want and that's where the individuality comes into play. So in the end (to me) sculpts don't really matter, it's what you do with them.

 

This is very common for me, because I also have face blindness in real life, and this situation is even more serious for BJD,. And sometimes, dolls from the same company are similar in some ways, which makes it harder for me to tell them apart.

 

My husband is faceblind and I tease him that he has absolutely no clue what I even look like.

now that said, with dolls I DO find that a faceup makes a huge difference and there's a LOT of sculpts I genuinely cannot tell apart anyway. The problem I think is that with very stylised heads like a lot of bjds they sorta all lean toward that conventional anime pretty kinda look and I can't pick out the subtle differences easily as a result. It all just parses as "generically pretty" to my eye lol.
this is probably why I tend to lean toward kinda wierd goofy face sculpts.

 

YES omg. I count it as part of the cost. I have to order dolls with faceups even if I'm going to just wipe it and send it to the artist immediately. Otherwise I can't imagine what a faceup would look like on them and get frustrated and sell them. Unless I have a REALLY solid idea of what I would want for the doll, it can't come blank. And unfortunately I'm no good at mockups xD

 

This was what made me choose the DF-A Auriel sculpt over the variant, just a slight change in demeanor. But on the other hand I identify with the "faceblind" crowd. It could be why I gravitate towards very unusual dolls like Miracle's Lestat and one of Telesthesia's stranger ones. A lot of the "softer" ones look very same-y to me, even though I know on a fundamental level they're different.

Fun fact: It's worse for me with female dolls. I want one very much, but all their faces blend right in! I'll say "That one! It's The One!" one minute and five minutes later I couldn't pick it out of a lineup of different makers and colors.

But as others have said, everyone has something that's most important to them. Faces are important, but so are bodies and eyes and face-up...! That's the wonderful world of dolls; it's one of those hobbies that is truly able to let you personalize to your heart's content.