Hair care for She-Ra dolls and animals

I have little hair styling experience with human dolls.  Compared with My Little Pony, hair care for She-Ra dolls needs more effort as the dolls are smaller than the average ponies.  Hence the She-Ra dolls that I have in my collection mostly have straight hair.  Only my Clawdeen and Glimmer dolls still sport their original curly hair and my strategy is to keep them clean so that I never have to clean up their hair. 

Nevertheless, I did manage to preserve the curled mane of the 3 Clawdeens cat dolls that came through my hands.  I did it with careful washing and not messing up the tight curls too much during the shampooing and conditioning.  Fortunately, all the 3 Clawdeens I had washed turned out fine with their original curls intact!

I basically wet Clawdeen’s curly mane with water and rubbed the hair gently in the direction of their curls with shampoo.  After rinsing off the shampoo, I applied conditioner to ’soften’ the hair and I used a small doll’s brush to gently ‘comb out’ any tangles in the hair.  Then I left the conditioner on Clawdeen for about 15min before rinsing it off.  I dried the hair as much as possible with a small towel so that the ‘weight’ of the water in the hair would not affect the shape of the curls as the hair dried.  After the hair had been semi-dried with the towel, I used a small brush to carefully ‘position’ as many curls back onto ’shape’ as possible.  Then I left Clawdeen in my balcony to dry out completely on her own.

My other experience with curly haired She-Ra dolls was with Glimmer.  Many second-hand Glimmer dolls that I came across had their hair super tangled and super frizzy through rough play and handling.  Some could not be restored unless you could invest in the time to careful re-do every tiny curl.  However as long as the hair was not frizzy, I managed to remove most of the tangles and restore the curls.