Blind Box Mermaids by Penny's Box and LuckyDoll

I was happy to read in the comments of the World Peacekeepers review that some of you are as excited about Lena and Ian's relationship as I am.  Lena doesn't really want me to talk too much about it here yet, but I can tell you that they've been chatting on the phone and have made tentative plans to get together again.  I hope the romance can stay alive without the beautiful sunsets of Culebra!

Speaking of Culebra, before we went on our trip, I hunted around for water-themed dolls that I could bring with me.  The best options were some blind box BJD mermaids that looked like they might be waterproof.  I've written a lot of reviews of this type of doll lately, namely the Street Series Adou boys and Natural Wonderland Antu girls from Penny's Box, and the Come4Free Bonnie dolls.  But I figured it couldn't hurt to explore one more style of blind box BJD.  

This time around I'm going to introduce a little competition into the mix by comparing the Penny's Box interpretation of a mermaid to similarly-sized mermaid characters from LuckyDoll.  This is a bit of a surprise-themed post since I'm not going to reveal which mermaids I got right away, but the timing didn't quite work out for a Sunday Surprise.  Nevertheless, here are the two contestants, still hidden away inside their boxes:

Tidal Secret Language by Penny's Box ($39.99) and Mermaid Chuchu by LuckyDoll ($29.99).

Tea with Lena: Penny's Box Street Series Adou

Before anything else is said, check out the beautiful new logo that Angelica Nyneave made for me!  It took half a day of wrangling with Blogger to figure out how to add this gorgeous art in high-resolution to the header (and I'm still working on the mobile view...) but it was so worth it!  Thank you, Angelica--you are a treasure.

Today, proud to be under such a fancy new header, Lena is back with the second installment of her new series!  In fact, she's going to be working with me all week as we host a little spring break celebration here on the blog.  So, be sure to check in every day to see what's new.

To start things off, Lena invited a guest over to her house who, um, caused a little bit of trouble.  He's from the Penny's Box series of blind box BJDs that I chatted about back in December:

Lena with Penny's Box Adou from the Street Series, $24.99.

Sunday Surprise: Penny's Box Natural Wonderland Antu Dolls!

Twitter is a bit of a disaster these days, so I hate to even mention it here on the blog, but I kind-of have to for this post, because without Twitter, I never would have known about the dolls I'm featuring.  I should mention, though, for anyone who is fleeing the Twitter chaos, that I've started an account at Mastodon.  I'll put everything that I post on Twitter on Mastadon, too.  Here's the link, which you can also find over on the right side bar -->

I joined Twitter so that I'd have a way to announce when I'd written a new review, and it's worked fine for that, but after following a bunch of people, I realize that it's also a great platform for learning about new dolls and appreciating talented artists.  In fact, it's maybe too good of a platform for learning about new dolls.  I feel like every time I log in these days, I end up buying something.  

Today's review was inspired by a Twitter friend from New Zealand, surprise-yawns, who introduced me to Penny's Box and their whole range of adorable blind box BJD-style dolls.  I find it mind-blowing that you can get a fully-articulated, adorable little elastic-strung doll in a blind box format...for about twenty bucks.  Sounds too good to be true, right?  Let's find out.

Box photo from Penny's Box Natural Wonderland Antu, $22.