Barbie Basics You Create Kit #2 Designed by Carlyle Nuera

March 27, 2025

The Hanes Sisters

Ok time to take a look at kit #2, the least appealing kit to me because of the crazy face sculpts. My feeling of reluctance proved to be correct reader, but this kit itself is not without a few compensating qualities. This time, in my opinion of course, we are given two cartoonish sculpts and one beautiful one. The beauty looks just like Kit, the Barbie Basics doll just released shortly before the kits were rolled out, the doll that was made to go with kit #1. But before we get to that dear reader, let's take a look at what comes in this particular kit. Kit kit kit kat kitty kitty kit kat. Ahem. Sorry...

"My name is Sally Rhubarb, and I live on a large farm..."

Here's who I like to call for the purposes of this organization sculpt number 1, also I can't find their names listed in a convenient spot and it should just be listed on the damn box, so I refuse to hunt for them any more than the couple of google searches I've already done. As you may notice, Number One is just looking at the tv on one side of the room with one eye and watching the cat play on the other side of the room with the other eye, because she's pretty well wall-eyed. She's also ceiling eyed of course, meaning she looks like she's just looking at nothing and I personally feel like I can't connect or lock eyes with her, as in the lights are on but nobody's home. The rest of her face is ok I guess but it's kind of long and her freckles aren't helping her because after those eyes I don't care anymore. They just add to my picture of her as inbred country bumpkin Barbie. The one thing I like to see is the eyebrows with the little eyebrow hair scratches at the beginning of each brow, that's cute. This girl had to go on the tall body because her face is sooo loooong.

"My pecan pie wins every year at the county fair."

I dressed Number One in the skirt with no direction (it has no up or down, no front or back, no matter how you put it on it looks like this) and the inexplicable top with straps that simply tie in the back for closure. If I had worn this top out dancing as a young girl, I would have definitely sweated it off and flashed the whole night club (I used to krump it) so it's a good thing it's got straps I guess, but I still wouldn't feel secure in a top who's back was only secured by two big swaths of fabric being tied together. Also, is that fashionable? It just seems weird to me.

She's floating!

I gave her the second-best shoes, the clear (again, why clear?) chunky heels with the very long extended toe beds in the front. I like these shoes, but I don't get the clear thing at all. Does every girl have a pair of clear shoes in their closet and I'm just missing out on the trend? None of my friends have clear shoes that I've ever seen. What are you trying to start here Mattel?

Does she know?

This one, Sculpt Two as I am calling her, is the only beauty in the box in my opinion. And her pink eyeshadow is calling out to the pink wig. It took me a minute to put them together but once I did, I knew they were meant to be. And as for her looking just like Kit, doll number one from the recently released Barbie Basics set of five, let's just lay that to rest right now:

Oh my.

Ok yes, they do look incredibly alike. Hoo boy do they look alike. The noses are slightly different, it looks like they might have shrunk Kit's nose for sculpt Number Two's face, but other than that they are pretty darn similar. Their lips are pretty much identical. That's interesting. I think I like Kit slightly better.

Pleather

I gave the beauty the pleather corset piece and the gold necklace. The necklace is a nice piece this time, still cheap, but passable in pictures. The skirt is a big cinch at the top and open at the bottom.

They're still in style!

The other good pair of shoes, in my opinion the nicest ones are these. They are black loafers with a gold chain detail across the top of the foot and big army boot soles that you could ford a stream in. These are little mini models of the only kind of shoes I wore to formal occasions in high school. Funerals, weddings, church, graduation, the prom, confirmation, all saw me clomping around in these, trying to seem like I wasn't trying to be noticed with my purple hair and dripping black mascara. I love them.

Number Three

Sculpt Number Three is paranoia. It's back to cartoon town for this lady. I tried giving her the earrings to lend her some kind of gravitas, but it only works a tiny bit. She looks skeptical and unsure of herself, not sure if she should be here, "Is this where the photo shoot is?" She is painted so that she always seems to be looking around a tree for the boogie man. She's just not very confident in her existence, and neither am I.

"Is that guy over there supposed to be here?"

I gave her what I would call the palazzo pants with the huge wide legs because this lady had to carry the disaster boots. They are big and black and big. They are so big even the tall doll can't bend her knee in them and what are my Barbies supposed to do just stand around all day? No, I need them working, bend those knees, flex those joints, dig that coal! I also gave her the most tailored shirt with the collar and long flowy arms, and the cinch detail on the chest, to kind of make up for the boots.

Zoiks.

Here are the boots, and it's really a shame because I like snakeskin or crocodile or rattlesnake or whatever they are trying to be. I like the gold heels (even though they bent immediately) but the height again did these boots in. If they had only cut off just below the knee and not in the middle of the knee. They could have been great, instead they hide in shame.

Oh, really zoiks...

One more shame that happened to my dolls and to a lot of other peoples' too from what I've seen on social media is this. Extra plastic. You may be asking yourself is this the remains of the twin Sculpt Number Three ate in the womb? No. Quality Control forgot to Exacto knife this girl. If I had an Exacto knife I'd fix her myself but unfortunately, I don't. If I decide to keep collecting Barbies, I guess I'll need to add that to my list of supplies. This doll cost me 33 bucks, sand that offa there or whatever you do Mattel.

These wigs though...

Someone on reddit I think asked me what these wigs were made of when I first got the kits and had only just opened kit #1, and I foolishly said "saran" because I had just read something saying that. But after handling these wigs further I have to say that I redact and apologize deeply for my previous statement, it was fool hearty of me to say such a thing when my own knowledge of the subject was so limited. These wigs are I think probably nylon. But whatever they are, they're not working well on these Barbie heads. They're full of flyaways and errant hairs, they're messy and have a terrible tendency to grow in size while just sitting quietly and being left completely alone, for the curly ones the ends are brutally dry and fried up like all split ends. And working with wigs on Barbie dolls is weird, their hair is always rooted. The wigs really don't want to stay on, which is pretty annoying. If you can get it to go on the way you want it to, and then you have to really squish it down on the doll's head to get it to stay on there, but you can get it to look good some of the time. In general, I think it's clear now that if Barbie is going to do wigs going forward, they definitely need to improve the wigs. The hair should be nicer, and the inside of the wig shouldn't hate being on the head of the doll so much. In fact, ideally it should be happy there.

"Was that a growl?"

The clothes arrived, as with the last kit, wrinkled and stuffed in a bag. It's pretty much fine since they are just polyester and the wrinkles do get stretched out for the most part, except on the bigger pieces like the big pants. I liked the earrings in the box, the sunglasses could not be put on the dolls' faces with the wigs on, and when I tried resting them on top of their heads, they looked like devil horns, so they were basically useless. Again, I think it's a crime against Barbie tradition, not to mention all that is holy that each of the three dolls don't have their choice of earrings. Big way to look cheap there. And throw some more accessories in there for crying out loud, flesh out the offering. Of the three, I would say this is the one I liked the least, which I feel bad saying for some reason (I feel like I don't want to hurt the girls' feelings) but the sculpts just weren't it this time, and the wigs left a lot to be desired for me. If I was going to skip one, it would be this one. Shhhh, don't let them hear us, let's just sneak out the back door, plus I'm actually still kinda siked for kit #3!

"Did you hear that? What was that?"