Modification Tan away the yellow! Dyeing a Limhwa french resin

I found this girl on the Marketplace, severely yellowed, and with marked tan lines on her thighs. Upon cleaning, I also found her hand had lost 2 fingers at some point (they were expertly reglued). She's a Limhwa Half-elf, in something like regular pink french resin.

She came to me a rich, butterscotch yellow. Her heel parts were kept in a box and are therefore much closer to her original color. That's the foot sitting on her chest there. it's quite a difference!

Here she is next to my other Limhwa half-elf, who is some kind of normal pink regular resin, and my mirodoll paper white body, just for comparison


Over in the customizing subforum, I researched all the ways of bleaching a doll back to its original color and said to myself, " wow, that's way too much work!" She's already fairly dark, so I decided to tan her instead.

I've been playing around with synthetic dyes a bit already, so I had everything I needed on hand.

Here she is all cleaned up and ready for dyeing. The only thing that lightened at all with the cleaning was her headcap, which, while paler, is still solidly in the crayon-box yellow range of colors. You can see the tan lines on her upper thighs about an inch above her knee there, and a bit of uneven yellowing on the ball of her thigh as well. Those are her heel feet up front there.


The dyes I used were iDye Poly's brown (because it is very red/warm), Rit DyeMore's Super Pink, and a touch of DyeMore Daffodil Yellow. I made a liquid concentrate out of the iDye for ease of measurement, then used eyedroppers to add small amounts to my water bath. In the end, it was 3 full eyedroppers of brown, 1 full eyedropper of pink, and 3 drops of yellow.



I checked the dyebath with a paper towel test strip, by putting a few drops in a shallow bowl, and finally used a chunk of scrap white resin (which apparently i didn't photograph) to test submersion time and dyebath color. Without the yellowing, my mixture was very pink -- perfect! Also, at full boil it looked like I'd only need to dip my pieces for about 30 seconds. I didn't want a super dark color, just a middle tan/brown that looked realistic.

And some 2 hours later....

Here's the last undyed piece on top of all the freshly-dyed pieces. Such a difference! So much better!


I am very happy with how things turned out! The dye took evenly and well, by and large. I didn't have any of the foaming or residue issues other have talked about when using the dyes for synthetics, possibly because I used so little of it (just eyedroppers instead of dumping the whole bag of dye into the bath).

That's not to say I didn't have a few snags.

• One of her hands fell off the string I was using to keep track of it in the roiling water and I spent a good minute hunting it out. It is noticeably darker than the rest of her. Limhwa's hands are so long and delicate, I feel like it's not worth it to try to fix with dye. If it bothers me later, I'll just blush it.
• The heel feet, obviously, are a different color, being a different color at the start.
• While the dye helped minimize the tan lines and uneven tone on her thigh, it did not cover it completely. Again, if it bothers me later, it's easily covered with clothing or blushing. Right now i'm too stoked by getting her tan to care.
• Apparently I didn't get all the sealant off some areas on the faceplate near the forehead and dome of the head, and on the back side of the knee joints. The headcap mottled something fierce, and the spots on the back of the knees took differently than the rest of her.
• Apparently she'd had some of her seams sanded at some point. Those areas took up more of the pink colors than the rest of the resin around them, especially on the torso.

To fix all this with dye, I'd have to attempt to match my mixed color (practically impossible. even industrial dyers have difficulty matching dye lots) and redo those pieces specifically, or scrap the whole thing, take everything back to undyed color and try again (I'm far too lazy for that!). Or, I could shrug it off and move on. Moving on it is! ;D

Here are some pictures of the problem areas:




And finally, here she is all put back together with her normal-resin sister in a couple different lights:

 

Thank you for the compliments everyone!

 

I wasn't sure, so I tried it out! Shirts cover the torso blemishes, and she'd have to be in daisy dukes or a miniskirt to really show the thigh lines. Pants, over-the-knee stockings, or a knee-length skirt will hide the thigh line adequately. Almost all the face mottling is covered by a wig with any kind of bangs, and the hands are only really noticeable if they're placed next to each other. All in all, pretty good!

 

Thank you! Mostly, I just winged it.

I had an idea in mind of the tone I wanted (somewhere medium tan). From some other experiments I did, I knew that the iDye poly's brown was very red, and from reading about yellowing in the Customization forum, i knew that the extra red was what I wanted to even her out. I made liquid concentrates with the powders and I tested the colors and mixes on paper towels and scrap resin before I dipped the doll itself. I kept the dip times very short, and the concentration of the dye in the dyepot very low to start with because it's much easier to go darker on something that's too light than it is to try to lighten something that's gotten too dark.

 

It's been quite a while on this thread! If you're trying to tan a french resin doll, I'd say just take your time and go carefully. There's a wealth of dying knowledge in the modification forum, and I can't have been the only one to have dyed french resin in all this time. I can't speak to trying to "bleach" or restore an old color. You might look for some of the posts dealing with restoring the reds in a regular resin and working from there.