Modification ear mod without ruining faceup?

This is not coming from personal experience so take it with a grain of salt. Just an idea.
I imagine you could make one like this from Angell Studio: Elf’s ears
I might start with protecting the head as you would with making a hard cap wig. Then maybe some thin floral wire to mold loosely around the shape of your doll's ear, sculpt the back ear onto it and check it on the protected head periodically to make sure it will fit.
When your ear accessory is cured you can attach it with putty or hot glue behind the ears so it won't harm the face up.

 

A properly done mod, no. That one requires a lot of sanding, some overlap with the existing ear and the material itself is easy to accidentally smear onto surrounding areas. You will at least damage any sealant and painting that was originally on and around the ear area.

I think buying or making some ears that can be stuck onto the regular ears works best, like the above me post already mentions. If you then have a wig that hides the seam between stuck on ears and the head, it's perfect. I know there are silicone and resin made ones, you just gotta search around a bit for them since they're usually made by third parties in small quantities (next to AS I think Obitsu made some too? Rest I've only seen on Yahoo Japan and etsy).

 

I would like to answer for the very theoretical "could you" even though I agree that if you can find an ear attachment you like already that's probably wisest. There are people on Etsy who sell ones for DD and off topic SMD interchangeably that might be made to suit the project, I'm not sure. But I noticed them in a variety of shapes which is really nice.
So if you wanted to modify and keep the faceup you could painstakingly remove sealant only from the ears, rough it up a bit I guess is necessary (sanding?) Sculpt your epoxy on, mask off the faceup (cover with paper towel or etc) then reseal to cover the ears and the sealant gap I expect you'd have where they joined the face, and then do your color matching and faceup integration, etc.
As complicated as that sounds I think... It's even more fussy and stressful trying to do things that require patch work than you might expect. I know because I've been doing it on my dolls to save resources, it is brutal. But I did do a subtractive mod on a dolls nose this year without removing the faceup and then just sealed over and blended blushing. It's possible, but for all the risks I'd probably look for seperate ear parts first.

 

I'm not experienced in modding, but as for finding ear attachments, I would like to note that Iplehouse KIDs have very small ears (only 1 cm wide).

 

I completely missed the KID part...but maybe Blythe ear attachments are an option then! They are pretty popular with customizers and somewhat easy to get.

 

This is super late, so hopefully this is still of some help but you can always try covering the face itself as much as possible, then working on the mods.

I have a doll whose ears I entirely sanded off while he had a faceup on. I just covered his face with layers of paper towel and masking tape, leaving only his ears exposed, and tried to be as careful as I could.

This would be difficult to do with eyelashes in, but you could maybe take a spare facecap and cut away parts of the sides where the ears are so the facecap wouldnt get in the way of the ear modding but would cover the face and eyelashes. (Id still reccomend putting masking tape to secure around it so no moisture/apoxie clay gets in)

 

I absolutely love these silicone ears from AliExpress.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256...lWpMvdS5&utparam-url=scene:search|query_from:

They stretch to fit, are very easy to glue on, and have the benefit of not breaking if you drop the doll. They are thin enough you can disguise the seam with a little thick paint.