Changing Eyes on a Gotz Happy Kidz Doll

I am a great fan of the blowdryer method as a go to for many doll customizations and repair as it's easy and quick and requires no clean up.

I'm working on a Gotz Happy Kidz Emily. She comes with blonde rooted hair and brown eyes. Many of the Gotz Happy Kidz share a similar mold and are renamed for a specific combination of eye or hair color. When you are customizing the name and hair or eye color becomes less important than using the body type you are looking for.

The first thing to know about a Gotz Happy Kidz is that they have articulation in the elbow of the arms and the knees of the legs. This is one of the things I love compared to American Girl 18" dolls because activities like being on a bike, car, or horse, those legs stick straight out awkwardly, but a Gotz doll can be posed more natural including tilts on the head rather than just a typical side to side.

I found this video helpful in starting to visualize how to get the head off. She uses the boiled water method in the video and putty behind flat back eyes, read through my notes after watching for tips that I found useful.

I started with a small area of table surface and got out my blow dryer and pointed it about an inch away from the neck and bottom of the chin. I let the vinyl get hot for about 5 minutes and it softened right up (this is my blow dryer on heat high). The neck did not need to be super squishy in order for me to complete my next task. I had two types of pliers ready, one with a curved edge and one with a straight edge. I ended up using both. The hole on the head is only wide enough to get about 2 adult fingers up in there, but first you need to pry out the head cup. It's a white piece about an inch and a half wide and it sticks upside down up inside the head. To get it out I used my curved pliers to open the head vinyl just a little bit to reach in and grab the edge of it and pull down. Once it was visible out of the hole I used the straight pliers to grip it better and pull it all the way out.

When it's all the way out it plops down like a cap on top of the neck and two long elastic pieces stick straight out of it with a zip tie. If your doll's stringing is loose, undoing the knot on top and pulling upwards will be a simple fix to pull up the slack without taking apart the whole doll.

With the head off you can really see what is going on inside. The Gotz eye socket is done so that eye lashes are glued to the eye lid and the back of the socket is open. Using your blow dryer again, aim at the eyes from the front and soften the vinyl. There is a small film of glue around the eye at the edges and the heat will loosen that as well. When the eye area is soft from heat you can push the eye from the front out through the back of the socket.

So what kind of eyes are these? The stock eye is an 18mm acrylic globe eye roughly 3/8" wide on the iris. If you've read our article on eye sizes you'll know there is some play in eye sizes. Sometimes dolls are manufactured with an iris size that is rather large to evoke the "doe eye" look. You can stay at this size or go a size down to reveal a more proportionate white of the eye to the face. Don't feel like you have to get the same exact thing as the stock eye. You have options!

I wanted to experiment with a few different options to see what works the best. These globe eyes are pretty large white all the way around so I wanted to start with the same size but a different shape. I started with an 18mm flat glass eye. Now it seems easy to just stick an eye at the back of the socket but that glass eye was really slippery on my two fingers fitting through the neck hole. It makes sense to use some sticky putty on your finger to keep the eye from falling off as you navigate to the back of the socket. I actually carefully managed to balance it on my fingers and get it in there. The flat back eye does work. Since there is space at the back of the socket, it is semi tricky to move it around in place and keep it there so I would recommend adding some craft putty behind it or plan on permanently gluing it in place so that it doesn't move after you put it in. It wasn't my favorite option because I like easy eye changes and being able to pop off a head and change the eye color is very appealing to me. Putty is an option but then you are buying that every time you pop in the eyes.

The next eye I tried was a 16mm globe eye. Although just a few mm short of an 18mm, I found that the circumference of the globe was significantly smaller, and the iris looked small as well so I didn't like the look of it at all.

The next eye I tried was a 20mm half dome eye. This was a bit bigger but I have them on hand for My Twinn and Reborn dolls so I gave it a go. Surprisingly I liked this option a lot. I was able to put my finger inside the half dome and guide it into the socket and push from the back to secure it. It was much easier than the glass flat back eye which kept falling off my finger. Amazingly the half dome snapped right into place and filled the socket and held tight without glue or putty. I found that you could also make her look different directions by tilting the half dome up or down or side to side just as you could with a globe eye. Even though I have an ample supply of 20mm half dome eyes, I did feel like I wanted to try one or two sizes down, because overall I do like a little more white showing on my doll eyes and I just felt the pupil size was just a bit too large. I am probably going to experiment with both the 18mm half dome and the 16mm half dome just to see which I like better. As well it is easy and much more affordable to purchase this type of eye than the globe eyes. I have found that many globe eyes produced make for a very spooky look. There is either not enough detail i.e. just a solid color ring, or it's a weird pattern in the eye. They often retail for $25-$50 and are usually glass. A half dome can be obtained for less than $20 and have a much more realistic pattern. The other thing I loved about this option was that I could pop different colors in and out fast and easy by softening up the vinyl from the front once again and pushing the eye out from the front. Popping in another color was very easy and I was able to look and see which colors I liked best.

To be continued - I'm going to test some more eyes before I finish this project and add some reference photos to this tutorial.