Monster High Review: The Meowlody and Purrsephone Sister Set

There's been a lot of Monster High excitement lately, at least in my house.  Do you remember back in January when I mentioned that Meowlody and Purrsephone went up for pre-order on Toys R Us for about 5 seconds?  Well, I pre-ordered the set then, but didn't actually believe they'd ever come.  I mean, the whole Monster High availability thing has been strange, don't you think?  In fact, I'd love to collect data on this.  Which dolls are showing up where?  Here in Maine, we have a lot of Skull Shores dolls, and that's about it. The Sweet 1600 dolls were easy to find for about three weeks and have now disappeared.  There was one huge shipment of Nefera DeNile and Operetta, and then nothing since.  I have still only seen two of the original Abbey Bominables in the store and have never seen a single Cupid.  I think I'll start a new poll about this.  The old poll revealed that 62% of you think JAMIEshow Lee looks best without a wig, which is pretty definitive, so I think we're ready for a new poll.

Anyway, out of the blue, the feline twins arrived yesterday.  I have not seen them in stores here yet, so I am glad I pre-ordered.  I was a bit nervous about ordering these online, though, since hand-picking a Monster High doll is significantly safer than buying one sight unseen.  Still, I figured it would be educational to see the quality level of a random sample.  Here they are:

Monster High Meowlody and Purrsephone gift set.

My first thought on seeing the box was that the cats look just like their promotional pictures.  My second thought was that they look messy.  If you look closely, you can see loose strands of hair everywhere, the box is dusty and there are suspicious specks on their faces.  That made me slightly uneasy:

Shouldn't Meowlody's hair have a black chunk with white stripes?  That would've been better:

The box is the same as all of the other large Monster High boxes.  It is a densely decorated cardboard window box with an orange and red theme.

There are facts about the twin sisters on the back of the box for those who don't follow the cartoon series.  For instance, they enjoy science--especially genetics.  Cool.

When I removed the bright cardboard insert and looked at the dolls more closely, they looked less messy.  I think the plastic window on my box was pretty beat up.  

The color scheme is very striking.  Their eerie eyes beam out at you from amidst all of that red and orange:

Actually, the box says that their favorite colors are orange and "burnt orange," so I guess that second color isn't red, but more of a burnt orange.

Look at how their tails are carefully arranged to form a heart:

It says "exclusive werecat sister pack" on the front.  I guess these are exclusive to Toys R Us.  I didn't realize that, but Monster High Wiki confirms it.

There are still a few spots and bits of hair on their faces, but I'll see which of those I can get off with a cloth once they've been freed from the box.  At least the eyes aren't wonky.

The eyes are fantastic.

The lip paint goes waaay below that lower lip.

The only hard thing about de-boxing these felids is the hand shackle in the middle:

I always have to cut these to get the hands out.

Here's what is in the box:

Two dolls and a diary.

As with the Clawdeen and Howleen set, there are no stands and no brush.  This is slightly disappointing.  With these two, though, there are no pets, either.  No pets!  That's massively disappointing.  Ok, I'll admit, it seems a little strange for a hybrid cat-person to have a pet, since they are, technically, half pet themselves, but still.  I want a hedgehog or a piranha in a fish bowl.  It does actually explain in the diary that the twins used to have a pet canary, but they had to give it away because Purrsephone is allergic.  Hmm.  I don't watch the TV show, but this seems like a creative excuse for not including a pet.  I mean, why can't they get a new pet?  A lizard, maybe?  A chihuahua?  Despite the absent accessories, they did, of course, cost me $29.99 just like the Howleen set.  They're actually listed on the Toys R Us site for $35 now, which is ridiculous.  Way overpriced.

Let's forget about all that for a sec. and look at Meowlody:

Ok, so the hair doesn't look exactly like the promotional picture.  The striped hair looks cool, but it is very stiff and bent.  They just glopped it all together and then painted the whole chunk of hair as one piece.  I know this is how Toralei was done, too, but I still haven't gotten Toralei out of her box, so this is my first face-to-face encounter with the striped hair technique.

Raccoon tail hair!

The stiffness of it wouldn't bother me too much, but underneath the striped chunk of hair, the regular hair is yellowed with the same glue/gel/goop.  I might have to try and wash it out...risking the loss of those well-defined stripes.

What happens to the goopy, stiff hair when kids play with these dolls, I wonder?  Does that big clump of striped hair break apart into smaller clumps?  Does the yellow stuff eventually brush out?  I'd really love to know how these hold up over time with kids who are playing with them a lot.

Look at how neat she is, though:

I love her bright yellow cat eyes.

The hair in back is free of goop and very soft and manageable.  It shed a bit when I brushed it, but nothing out of the ordinary.

You can see her grey scalp through the pale hair, which is a bit weird.

I really love her mix of dark grey vinyl and pale platinum hair.  Her greyscale palette makes the yellow eyes and bright red lips stand out in an attractively creepy way:

The lip thing is still bugging me, though.

I'm not sure I like the large white patch on her face.  Perhaps thin stripes like Toralei's would have been better?  It's a realistic pattern for a cat, as you can see here, but I still prefer more subtle marks on the face.  Monster High is not about subtlety, though, that's for sure.

The bangs are very stiff and have some yellow goop on the very tips.  I tried to brush the hair a bit to soften the edges and get the yellow out, but it just made the edge of the bangs uneven:

I'll have to snip that...

Better.

Meowlody has very little in the way of jewelry.  She does not have earrings or a necklace.  She has some generic bangle bracelets on each wrist and a plastic purse that looks like a ball of yarn. 

The purse is a very clever idea, but in the end it just looks like a plastic ball of yarn.  It doesn't really say "purse" to me.  It doesn't open.  Compare it to one of Clawdeen's purses:

Now, that's a purse!

She has a pink glove painted onto her left hand:

There were complaints about the paint on Sweet 1600 Clawdeen's glove, and those seem to have been addressed with this doll (although Toralei has good gloves, too, and she came out before Sweet 1600, didn't she?).  Anyway--the glove is painted nicely, showing a little bit of grey wrist on the bottom of the hand.

Meowlody comes with a black pleather vest jacket.  The material is very thin...almost like paper. It has a little ruffle along the back hem and a silver ribbon belt.  The design is cute, but I can't help but wish that it had more cat-related details or some kind of theme.

Underneath the vest, Meowlody is wearing a tiger print shirt.  She's also wearing an orange denim micro mini skirt with black stitching.

The shirt opens and closes with velcro all the way down the back, except for a small part of the shirt at the very bottom of the hem that connects the two sides.  The connected part goes under her tail to cover her lower back.  You have to put the shirt on by pulling it over her legs.  It's a bit of a pain.

It is a fairly simple outfit, but the black and white shirt contrasts nicely with the orange skirt.  Remember how I said Howleen was too Halloween?  Well, you'd think there would be a similar problem with this outfit, but the skirt is a deeper orange, and it's pretty much the only orange, and so I think it works.

Uh, oh...thong ribbon skirt alert.

She's wearing knee-high black boots with molded bow details and pink heels:

They go on and off easily, which was a pleasant surprise.

Under the clothes, Meowlody's body is all grey.  It's a neat color and gives her a very dramatic look.  She has white stripes down her right arm and down her left leg.  Her tail rotates 360 degrees around, but it isn't bendable.  Forgive me, but I think it looks like a monkey tail:

Werecat/monkey

I like how her tail can contribute to her expressiveness.

The hip joints in these dolls are not strung.  They have the newer plastic articulation.  I like this a lot better than the elastic.

There are a few messy areas on her body.  They look like smudges of glue:

And some sloppy seam work on her side:

Purrsephone is Meowlody's mirror image twin.  I think Purrsephone dyed her hair, because mirror image twins are always identical.  Other than the hair, they are perfect mirror images of each other.  What this means for these dolls is that Purrsephone's stripes are on the opposite limbs and her tail is bent the opposite way:

The hairstyles are the same (except Purrsephone's striped bit is on the opposite side).  Purrsephone's dark hair doesn't show any of the yellow staining, and you also can't see her scalp through it, so I slightly prefer it to Meowlody's platinum.

She needs a bit of a trim.

This doll has more facial defects than the other one.  She has smudged paint on her nose and some glue marks on her cheeks.  I think the doll's noses hit the plastic window on the box and this rubs the paint off.  The white parts of her face were clearly painted over the grey, and while I don't have any suggestions about how this could have been done better, it looks strange in the areas where there's some grey showing through the white.

The eyes are perfect on this doll, too.

You can see a small glue or hair gel mark on this side:

And a pretty large mark on the other side:

Also, it's funny how her lip paint doesn't match the sculpt of her lips--not just that lower lip, but look at the edges of her mouth compared to where the lipstick ends.  Huh.  Anyway, I had to put these two pictures together because I think it looks neat:

Notice, above, that the goop/glue marks on the side of Purrsephone's face came right off with a moist towel.  Phew!

Purrsephone has a very similar outfit to Meowlody's.  The jacket is red (also very thin fake leather) with a ruffle in the back:

This jacket has a much more interesting ribbon belt and also has some angled silver decoration in the front that is reminiscent of a military jacket:

This makes me think of Michael Jackson.

Purrsephone's boots are also tall and black, but aren't quite as interesting as Meowlody's:

They're also hard to photograph.

The two skirts and purses are very similar, but they have subtly different colors.  Purrsephone's is a deep red (burnt orange?) and Meowlody's is a deep orange.  The difference between them is so subtle, at first I just assumed they were exactly the same:

It looks like each girl is supposed to have a glove that matches her sister's skirt. It almost works, but Meowlody's glove looks pink:

Purrsephone's top is also a tiger print, but hers is, predictably, white with black stripes:

It's very fun to play with the tails.  Love 'em.

I had some fun with these two cool cats together:

Please let our bff Toralei out of her box!

There are no finer cat than we am.

Bottom line? There was a drop in quality control with these two, I think.  This depresses me a bit because I always thought Mattel was doing a good job of maintaining or even improving on the quality of these dolls as they rocket in popularity.  I have seen this kind of quality decline happen so many times, though, it doesn't surprise me.  The hair styling is messy, the face paint looks rushed in some places and there is an absence of the little details and accessories that make Monster High dolls extra special.  Of the three werecats, Toralei is my easy favorite.  I like the striped face paint better than the big white patch, and I prefer her short red hair:

And she has a pet.

Despite the quality issues, I do enjoy the dolls.  I like the concept of mirror image twins and I think these two play off that theme in a fun way.  I love how they look posed together.  I really like the dark grey body color and even though the tails looks simian, I think it adds a lot to the dolls' personalities and to their posing repertoire.  They're keepers.

As an aside--I am not usually one to mess with an original, but in this case, I had to see what could be done about the glue stains and the stiff hair.  I washed Meowlody's hair in warm water and it came out like this:

Not only did I loose the definition of the stripes, I'm loosing the stripes.  They wash out.  So now she has a lot of little black flecks of loose paint in her hair:

Oops.  Big mistake.

That's my fault, though.  I should have just left the hair alone.  I'll probably wash all of the black out now, so it doesn't look funny.  On the up side, her hair is soft and goop-free, and her bangs look much better, I think.  The glue mark on her neck did not wash off.  That's there to stay.

I have such mixed feelings about this duo.  I had a fun time photographing them, and I like them enough to keep them, but they leave me a bit worried about where the quality of Monster High dolls is headed.