I have a doll here that I’m pondering

My mom found her in a box of other old related goodies at an auction or something and I’m trying to decide what to do with her.

• She is a vintage Bubblecut Barbie, and man, I have just never been able to see bubblecut as anything but grandma.
• However, one of the things that really interests me is different perceptions of hairstyles and looks through different eras, especially after all of the family photo history I inherited. At some point, this was trendy as hell and definitely would have been on teenagers, and it would be cool to be able to see it that way. I think illustrations of the time come really close to capturing the vibe.
• I’m also interested in finding a way to make the vintage Barbie sculpt look more like the really lively and energetic illustrations they made of her, rather than bored and aloof. I have looked at a lot of alternate painting jobs on this face and have done a couple sketches over faces myself digitally that I think I have a good idea of what I need to do.
• She has a loose arm and dirt in tiny cracks all over her legs that I can only describe as crazing on an oil painting. A lot of it has washed away with an initial visit from dish soap and a toothbrush, so she doesn’t feel gross to touch anymore, but it’s still very in there. The inner ring in her neck is also mostly completely detached meaning she would probably transfer onto a new body fairly well…
• I cannot decide if her being kind of in a rough shape makes her the ideal candidate for me to try to enjoy how this hair and sculpt combo looks or if I would be better off just making her into something new entirely and waiting for a reproduction bubble cut to show up for a very low to normal amount of money. I think I might have some stray bubble cut heads in my stash even, but that this one was attached to a body and that my mom had spent a lot of time looking at it anticipating that I would bring it back from the brink kind of makes me want to do something with it in particular.
• Reproduction dolls also historically have so much more hair than their vintage counterparts so I wonder if I would be somehow doing it wrong hahaha.
• A pro to doing this kind of experimenting on a reproduction doll also means that the vinyl is a lot more stable and less likely to turn into like a surprise sticky mess like the other vintage bubble cut that I transformed. She still looks good but she’s got the sticky face now and it is a Bummer.
• Because she’s missing some hair while the rest of it looks nice and even in original curl, I would have to find a way to root and style fractions of a bubble cut? Not to mention trying to match hair color and fiber.

She’s also missing a finger but I do love the coral color nail polish. I keep thinking it would be fun to match the color for her lip paint.

Maybe the solution is like a hybrid of my normal approaches where I just fill in all of the chopped off hair plugs with some funky color I like and then do some traditional matching coral on her lips and most of the experimenting on her eyes, which was where I was intending to do most of that anyway.

It’s possible I just needed to talk out loud and type all of this to come to some kind of conclusion.

Here is a picture of Onyx playing hard and causing a mess for your trouble.