1/6 Scale Action Figures, Thoughts and Trivia

My favorite Girls

Actually they are all my favorites, some because they're beautiful, some because they remind me of real-life girls or women and some simply because they're cute.
These Girls are really special to me:

Nicky, for the way she smiles at me, she's the most adorable of my Girls
Melody, she's simply gorgeous
Caroline, she represents those hidden qualities that you can bring out with a bit of love and attention
Vera, my Number One Spares-box Sweetheart
Margiana, her sweet smile makes her the focal point in my display cabinet
Claudia, my first true Spares-box Sweetheart
Emma, not only because she's my first repaint, I just love the way she looks
Kathy, a gorgeous naughty looking redhead
Sylvia, my little movie star, her lovely face complements her glamorous figure perfectly
Jessica, she's so cute, always puts a smile on my face and usually ends up having exactly the right expression on pictures
Priscilla, lovely and beautiful, her smile still makes me 'stop in my tracks'
Julianne, cute, gorgeous and freckle-faced, a perfect little redhead
Denyse, the lovely dark-skinned beauty I'd been searching for for ages
Joy, cute and radiating happiness like no one else
Fleur, lovely, cute, fun and gorgeous, Fleur ticks all boxes

Repairs and enhancements

All those repair guides don't mean that Cool Girls are fragile or prone to breaking, most of these figures are really sturdy (I've never broken a CG part myself, apart from an aftermarket ankle peg and ankle post).
It is just that I wanted to be able to repair things so I bought some broken Cool Girls on purpose ! Details on how I turned these broken bodies into Girls can be found on a separate page.

Originally, Cy Girls were just designed to be taken out of the box and be posed, which is why the ankle cups of the v1.0 bodies were prone to breaking when the boot feet were removed. There was also a batch of v1 bodies made with fragile knee joints.

Once I had my first Cool Girls I planned to make some spare/replacement parts (ankle cups in particular) and do some modifications and repairs (you can find links to the results on the repairs page). One thing still on my list is making hands with bendable fingers.
Since I wanted to be able to repair and restore Cool Girls, I also needed to be able make pleather (leather-like vinyl coated fabric) boot sleeves and clothing, as pleather deteriorates easily and unpredictably.
Sofar I made some pleather boot sleeves, a couple of cropped jackets and some pairs of shorts, some more info can be found on the Accessories page.

The pages on rerooting hair and painting faces started with me taking some in-progress pictures for me to document what I was doing.
Particularly when painting faces I tend to get an 'uhoh, how do I get this to look the way I want' feeling halfway, I hope the pictures help to overcome such feelings.

Some random thoughts and trivia

One of my main criteria for buying or making a (Cool) Girl figure is simply 'if she were real, would I want to date her ?'.
Three things that make a girl more attractive (to me): a sweet smile, a nice sweater and a pair of well worn blue jeans. Most of my Girls do smile sweetly and most are dressed in sweaters. Jeans are a bit of a problem for CG as the fabric is a bit too stiff, but pleather jeans or shiny leggings do stretch and look great too.
I try to dress a Girl in a way that matches her character (i.e. the expression on her face).
The proportions of CG bodies are exaggerated by about 10% to compensate for the thickness of the clothes.
Measurements of the regular CG v2 body are 27.5cm tall, B14 W9 H14, which translates to about 165cm tall, B84, W54 and H84 (that's about 65in/5'5" tall and 33-20-33 in inches) in real life, which is similar to beautiful women like Jennifer Connelly.
One major difference between the action figures and the static scale models in my display cabinet is that with action figures the novelty just doesn't wear off: just change a pose or dress a figure up differently and you have something new to look at.
A typical CG head has some 400 holes in which plugs of hairs have been inserted, these holes are arranged in a spiral pattern with a length of about 40 cm.
If you'd put all the hairs of a long haired CG head end to end, the total length would be about 1 km.
As my collection keeps growing I now have duplicates of some head sculpts (in particular of Ice and Cutey Honey), but sofar each of these faces has a different expression.
Why have several scarlet haired Cutey Honeys ? Well, apart from being lovely they also remind me of the lovely Grid Girls that I have encountered at race tracks.
With Vera I added a new Girl with a limb-difference to my collection, do I plan to make more ?
I don't plan to make more, but you never know... Actually I did not even plan to make Claudia the way she looked before I fixed her legs, I just tried to make the best I could do with the parts I had, gradually adding improvements whenever I got a bright idea or got some new parts.
I love the challenge of creating a 'spares-box sweetheart': a nice looking Girl made out of spare parts or even 'rejected' parts. I put an overview of all Girls that started as repair jobs on a separate page.
Compiling the Bodies page made me wonder if I wanted to own some of the latest seamless soft skinned bodies.
Actually I don't think I do: costs aside, those bodies would add a new level of realism to the collection and would create too much of a difference between those and my current Girls. I am perfectly happy with the Girls I have on my shelves right now, seams and all.
I should give credit to fellow MWD member Codename Silent G for the idea of putting a Barbie head on a CG body. Others have also done this but his Gillian, a CG v2 body with a lovely Barbie Fashion Fever Gillian head, really showed me how great this combination could look.
Adding a couple of Barbie-headed Girls really raised the level of cuteness and Jessica in particular looks like she's always having fun.
Some of my Girls and most of my B-Girls are standing on bare feet, just because it looks cute.
Whenever I want to take a picture of a loose CG head, I place it on a spare ZC Eve bodice perched on an old bottle of Liquid Paper, hence the armless torso with the yellow bikini top in all of those pictures.
I would like to have a bit more variation in skin color, but finding matching heads for the few darker colored CG style bodies proves to be quite hard.
In particular I would love to add a Girl like Foxxy Cleopatra: big smile, big hair and loud sexy 70ies clothes.
With Julianne I added my tenth B-Girl and it looks like there will be more as I just found out that most of my CG-style spare heads have turned rock-hard, i.e. unusable, (mostly cloned ones, I suspect the hair of drawing softening agents out of the vinyl of the head...) .
With Denyse I finally found the dark skinned 'big hair, big smile' head I'd been looking for. She may not be an original Mattel head but the quality comes close and she's really cute.
After Claudia and Vera, Claire is yet another Girl with a limb-difference, repairing Claudia rendered both the bodies used for Vera and for Claire incomplete, currently there are no more (slightly) incomplete bodies in my spares-box.
With Claire I had one more reason to turn her into a Barbie-headed Girl: Mattel recently released a Barbie with a prosthetic leg and a pair of Barbies in wheelchairs, but I suspect releasing a Barbie with a hand or an arm missing might be a step too far for Mattel.
Some (cloned) CG heads had not only turned hard but also had started to weep plasticizers so I (reluctantly) began replacing those weeping heads. Anne was the first one, with a new Barbie head fitted she became Janet.
Getting the lovely Kassandra head finally allowed me to put a head with a matching skin tone on the Walking Paradise body I had repaired before.
After dressing Kassandra in a tight leotard I was surprised to see how much better the Walking Paradise body looks, compared to regular ZC Eve bodies.
My first try at merging parts of two bodies into one took a lot of unexpected 'work', but in the end it resulted in the lovely Penny.
Once Penny was on her feet her ankles turned out to be floppy, so I had a good look at how to make LM ankles more firm, made a page about it and added that to the repairs list.
In late 2020 I noticed that in Japan collectors prices for boxed Cool Girl figures were dropping because of deteriorating pleather costumes, so I bought a discounted new-in-box v2 Cutey Honey. At first I just opened the box to let the fumes vent out for a few weeks. Then I carefully took her out of the box, her costume indeed had deteriorated but the figure is in perfect condition.
After buying the discounted Cutey Honey I also bought a discounted 'Dio in CG' and to my surprise her costume was like new, no signs of deterioration at all !
After my first body bash I decided to try assembling a body out of parts from my spares box. This proved easier than I thought and resulted in Dahlia, a Spares-box Sweetheart in every sense of the word.
While preparing a TTL body for use I decided to note down all modifications and put these on a separate page, afterall TTL bodies are the last type of hard bodies available new (as unbranded bodies on eBay).
After fitting Kayla, my latest Spares-box Sweetheart, with a pair of lower legs from my sparesbox, I found that some spare vinyl parts such as feet were deteriorating, causing them to break.

About this site

Whenever I write 'Girl' (with a capital 'G') I'm referring to one of my female action figures.
The layout of the pages on this site does not require a certain browser window width, however the layout might look odd when viewed full screen on a 1920x1080 screen (but then again Microsoft named its GUI Windows ... )
I've added some Javascript to the main CG page to present a randomly selected picture every twenty seconds.
There's some more Javascript on the 'CG related links' page: I prefer to collect all external links on a single page, with Javascript enabled a symbol points to the link that was referred to, so for example if you click a link to 'Men With Dolls Forum' on a page, the 'CG related links' page opens with a hand symbol pointing to the external link for the 'Men With Dolls Forum'. With Javascript not enabled no hand symbol is shown so you just have to find the proper link on the 'CG related links' page yourself.
There is yet more Javascript on this page to display the faces of my favorite Girls next to the list when the mouse moves over the names in the list. The same trick can also be found on the B-Girls page.
The page name for each Girl has a prefix indicating what type of body the Girl has: 'cg_' for CY Girl, 'ht_' for Hot Toys True Type, 'lm_' for Ladies Mission, 'pb_' for BBI Perfect Body, ut_ for Underground Toys, 'ta_' for Triad Alpha, 'ttl_' for TTL bodied Girls, 'zc_' for ZC Girl Eve and Walking Paradise bodied Girls and 'b_' for unmodified Barbies.
I've added CY Girls style 'ID cards' to all the Girls pages, listing details about the figure and the date on which she joined my collection.
I've added a head sculpt code to the 'ID cards' of all true Cy Girls, this code is engraved in the back of the neck of each CG head sculpt. There are some surprises with these codes, some codes are obviously reused for a new sculpt of the same figure. The biggest surprise to me was finding a CG01 code on the Ash v2 head.
To celebrate 5 years of collecting Cy Girls, I added a click-able picture of all the Girls in my display cabinet to the Action Figures page.
Taking pictures of my Girls is at least as much fun as collecting them is, so I created a page with my favorite CG pictures.
I made an index page for all the repairs and enhancements on this site. I used Style Sheet (CSS) elements to display the available links by category.
With Javascript enabled a category is shown when the mouse moves over parts of the figure on the picture, with Javascript switched off all available links are listed next to the picture.
When all links are listed, some overlap may occur if the user overrides the font size with one larger than 12pt, any overlapping text can be made visible by zooming in on the page.
I made a copy of the repairs page without the use of CSS and Javascript just in case the fancy features don't work.
I put everything I know about the different types of female action figure bodies on a separate page.
In 2014 I added a page with some statistics and a change log.
In 2017 I added the older statistics and change logs on separate pages. I keep records of all changes I make to the site so it was fun to browse old versions of pages and see how the few simple pages developed into quite a substantial part of my website.
After finding catalog numbers on the back of Barbie heads, I compiled a list of the codes I found and added that to the head sculpt code page.
The list of repairs and modifications grew too long to fit next to the picture of Evelyn, so in January 2020 I completely revised the repairs page. I did away with the style sheet driven lists so I also removed the plain copy of the page. With Javascript enabled the picture next to each list changes when moving the mouse over a link.
Every month I put last months most popular CG picture and CG page on the stats page, for November 2021 this resulted in a perfect combination of portraits of Kathy and Isis: Fire and Ice.

Back to my Cy Girl main page