Sealing Vinyl Dolls!?

I'd love to know more about this too - I have recently started doing more vinyl faceups, and I use Liquitex matte medium with my airbrush, but they always get so.....sticky? Like, the sealant is dry, but it attracts so much dust and so many fuzzies while I'm working, it makes me want to cry. D:
I first noticed it on my first Smart Doll faceup, and then even more so on my DD head.

Using ZM spray seems to be better, but since it's so humid where I live I don't always have the opportunity to use aerosols.

 

Sealant tends to attract dye and dirt, which is why on BJDs a common stained area is the forehead. A wig cap will stain the sealed forehead, but not the usually unsealed head cap.

However, it only stains the sealant. Once the faceup is removed the stain is usually not there anymore.
In case of vinyl I'm not so sure though if the dye won't just seep through (like it does on silicone wig caps).

Taking two unused hands, one sealed and one not, might be a good way to test this

 

I own a Volks Dollfie Dream I -- the body is mostly hard plastic, I believe ABS but might be PVC or a mix of both. I body blush her at one point, so I had her sealed with MSC, I didn't like the way it looked so I removed it when it got damaged but never tried again. I keep my resins in the closet, and because my DD is a hybrid with a resin head, I also keep her in the closet nude. I didn't see any staining when I had her blushed, but she did had some staining from before, because I only use black clothes on my dolls (becaue I am a weirdo, who only feels comfortable wearing black, and I feel my dolls would also feel the same way, hypothetically). The MSC might have helped, but because it's vinyl, the stains got absorbed into it, eventually. I don't see them there anymore -- it wasn't due to the MSC that the staining was gone, it was just the vinyl doing its own thing. I don't handle my dolls anymore, and because I prefer (find it less of a struggle) to sew clothes for males, I handle my DD the least, so her staining from the black dyes are completely gone by now. The MSC definitely did prevent further dye absorption while it was on there, as it tends to do for other plastics.

I didn't like the feeling of the MSC on her soft vinyl, but that's just because I am a weirdo. I don't know how helpful my ramblings will be, but I hope they are of some help to some. (:

Edit to add: A lot of fashion doll head sculpts are made out of soft vinyl. I don't own a full vinyl bodied doll yet, so I don't know if it is the same kind as the heads, or the same as the OG Volks DD vinyl bust, but sealing the vinyl on the heads helps to keep them from staining when customizing them as you would a resin head -- they don't need a fixative to be painted on. The fixative is easy to clean, if it's just dust or lint, if it's staining from human-oils, or dyes, you'll have to remove the fixative to remove those, but if the point is preserving the life of the vinyl, it might be worth a shot to use a fixative on it.

 

Clean hands and avoiding clothes, adhesives, and things that could leave a mark is most of it but accidents and life happens.
Some art supplies can stain or bleed, especially red ones, so maybe test things on a junk store Barbie first.
For sealant I use paint on liquitex, research the difference between green and red labels I don’t have the answer at hand.
Never used spray on the vinyl dolls. With the most traveled resin his hands always looked dirty and it was the spray which I took off.

 

@AirimirOfGondor For whatever reason I have a consistent problem that acrylic gloss or matte varnish pretty much always goes sticky on any vinyl doll I use it on, which on just the lips for example, is not tragic and I can manage to still keep them looking good by cleaning them gently with water every so often, but for this reason I do not recommend using airbrush or brush on liquid acrylic sealants on vinyl. For the longest time I used MSC for my Dollfie Dream and Obitsu faceups, and that always went really well for me. I even managed not to have any staining after wiping a faceup, a joy that I sadly no longer have after switching to the citadel varnish because it's easier to get locally where I am now. So the citadel doesn't seem to do very well at protecting from stains, however it doesn't get sticky on the vinyl for what that may be worth.

I'm really not sure how much protection you would really get from coating your vinyl doll in sealant. Probably some, but I wonder if it would be enough to make a difference over all? As for myself I avoid staining just by setting them only on clean surfaces, washing my hands, dressing them only in prewashed clothes made of certain fibers, using wig caps and socks to protect when needed, etc.

 

@AlisonVonderland I was able to do two successfully using air brushed sealant for in between layers (I used ZM spray right at the end), and so far it all turned out OK, but yeah the annoyance of trying to keep it clean until the end was such a hassle. I'm not sure which is more annoying; the stickiness, or needing to wait for the humidity to be good to use aerosols!

 

@AirimirOfGondor I hope they don't just go sticky on you later because it always happens to me the last few years and nothing like putting aerosol sealant over the top after will fix it for me.

 

@AlisonVonderland Oh I hadn't thought of that. D: I do suppose my DD girl was really just a test faceup, so I guess I can continue using her as a test subject to see if she stays OK for a while or not. :3