American Girl’s new “ historical“ dolls are from 1999.
You know. 24 years ago.
This brand has officially become a parody of itself.
Why do they look like they’re wearing makeup? What’s with the highlights? Aren’t they supposed to be like eight years old? Maybe I just wasn’t a hip enough elementary-schooler in 1999, but I didn’t know anybody whose parents let them dye their hair. Even natural colors. It was just much less of a thing for kids back then than it is now. Ditto makeup – at least where I lived
(maybe their lips are just stained from cherry Flintstones push-up pops?)
These don’t look like a little girls in the late 90s. They look like 21-year-old TikTok influencers in 2023

American Girl dolls are usually more like 11-13, and as someone who was a high school freshman in 1999, this seems totally realistic to me for wealthy characters from that time. I couldn’t find these characters ages, but that’s the spread of the original characters. Molly was the youngest at 10. Especially by the nineties when we were seeing the invention of the tween, there’s a huge difference between 8 and 12. I mean I had very conservative parents and I was still allowed tinted lip balm at 12, and some of my friends had regular lip gloss. The outfits are straight out of a Delia’s catalogue. The hair isn’t dyed, it’s highlighted. We used sun-in to try and get highlights which does kind of work, but wealthier kids actually talked their parents into professional highlights. It kind of depends on their precise age, but it doesn’t seem out of bounds to me.
I mean the whole concept of 1999 dolls seems silly, but it’s not like they didn’t do their research
I’m way more concerned that American Girl dolls got rid of their book series, and instead have one book. Like wasn’t the point to encourage reading and learn about the past
this is meant in a discussion tone, not a combative one, just to be clear! your memories of the era are obviously just as real as mine!
I’m not exactly up on the line past Kit, much, but which ones are 13? all the ones I’m familiar with are 9 and turn 10 over the course of their stories, and Wikipedia lists them as “8-11 years old.” Felicity and Samantha were also 9-10, I remember that much, and looking at the character birthdays almost all of them seem to be around that range. I still don’t recall any 10-year-olds with highlights in 1999, though I was rather younger (could be regional; I grew up in an upper-middle-class suburb of Nashville, Tennessee)
tinted lip balm or lip gloss, maybe, for 10-year-olds. I still feel like it was uncommon- again, at least in my region -but I do remember Lip Smackers party favors and such
the other salient thing to me, and I mentioned this in another reblog, is that these dolls don’t look like the actual modern-line American Girl dolls from 1999
why wouldn’t they just use the existing patterns? surely they must still have them, and what could be more authentic? (spoiler: it’s because they don’t care about authenticity anymore). the dolls pictured above actually look like my memories of being a kid in 1999- not like a Delia’s catalogue run through TikTok filters, with some Grin Pins off in the corner to add insult to injury
As soon as I saw it, I knew that they weren’t so much selling to little girls as they were to their moms- women now in their mid-30s who were tweens in 1999. They’re selling nostalgia. Looking at the clothes and the products, it’s all SO INTENSELY 90s that it fails to like…. show what the 90s were actually like. For real only kids on TV were ever dressed that stylishly. Srsly everything is just so intensely nostalgic and curated for nostalgia.
