Doll Review: Lille Love Doll

Lille Love dolls are available from www.la-romi.com but I have also seen some for sale new on eBay. They are 34cm tall and priced at £36. I originally purchased the doll because I thought it looked very similar to the Minikane dolls and might be useful as another model for my Minikane dolls clothing. It turns out they are not very similar at all. I wrote a blog post about it here.

My doll is Bastiaan, who is from The Netherlands. There are other dolls in the range from other countries. Bastiaan came in a reusable drawstring bag, wrapped in a brown paper bag inside and he came with a passport and a birth certificate. He also came fully dressed in a cute outfit. He was manufactured by Nines D'Onil in Spain. His clothes were also made there too.

I think his face looks really nice, with green eyes (non sleepy eyes, so they stay open all the time) and painted freckles. I don't think all the dolls have freckles, it would only be if they matched the doll's complexion. His hair looks really nice too, but it felt very weirdly sticky, as if there is some kind of styling product in it to keep it in position. I thought his skin tone was nice. Sometimes dolls can have too orange a skin tone or just a very unrealistic looking skin tone. His mouth is slightly open, but not enough to be able to fit a dummy or bottle in.

His body felt oddly out of proportion. Dolls bodies usually are out of proportion, but for having such a large head, Bastiaan's body just looked too skinny. It's less of a chubby baby type of body and more of a slimmer child's body, which may be the look the manufacturer was trying to achieve. It just looks a bit odd to me.

Quality-wise, I found little bits of vinyl that should have been trimmed off around the edges of the neck and some of the joints, and also there was some hair at the back that was longer than the rest, and one single strand that was much longer than the rest. There were fine vertical marks on the back of the doll's head, which I think may have been caused by scissors while his hair was being cut. I assume the hair is cut by hand using scissors, but maybe it's all done by machine. Scissors seem the most likely cause of the marks to me. These are not terrible flaws and some of them are barely noticeable, but it's slightly disappointing for something that's supposed to be from a prestigious doll maker.

The birth certificate was printed on decent quality card, printed on both sides too. The printing of the passport was also very nice. There are stamps inside and space on extra pages for children to put more stamps of their own. He does have his year of birth printed on both though, which was 2019, so the doll is probably going to be older than the child he is given to, which might be a bit odd.

I thought the clothing was very poor quality. The hems on the trousers didn't match up. No idea what was going on at the back of the trousers.. Before I even removed the clothing I saw that the stitching holding the velcro on was extremely loose. Overall, the stitching on the top looked so poor quality that I thought the top would quickly fall apart. It definitely didn't look up to the wear and tear of a child playing with it. The label doesn't say what fabrics the clothes are made from, but the trousers have a polyester feel. The top may be made from cotton though. The washing instructions say to surface wash the outfit only, which isn't great when it is going to be played with by young children.

I was just inspecting the top further and I noticed that the pieces have actually been cut out the wrong way. For a top, the stretch should go around the body, and around the arms, so the grain of the fabric should be running vertically. This top has the stretch in the wrong direction. Very strange because the print is the right way up. Maybe the fabric was printed wrong and they just cut the pieces so it was in the right direction??? The pale yellow top shows how the grain should look.

Overall, I thought Bastiaan was a very cute little doll with a nice face. He actually looked cuter than he had looked in the photos on the website. I appreciated the minimal packaging too. With some dolls you practically need a whole toolkit to get them out of their boxes with all the screws and plastic cable ties, so it's nice to be able to just unwrap the doll. Many of the Spanish dolls like the Minikane and Miniland dolls come without clothing and are at a similar price point, so it was nice to have the doll fully dressed in a cute outfit. Unfortunately the outfit was very poor quality. I'm sure any child would love the doll though. Since the range has dolls of several different ethnicities, you could potentially give your child a doll that looks like them.

Clothing wise, the Lille Love dolls are quite difficult to find clothes for. As I mentioned, I originally thought they would be very similar to the Minikane dolls since they're the same height. But with a much skinnier body and longer legs, the Lille Love doll doesn't really fit my Minikane clothing very well.

These dungarees fit Minikane dolls perfectly and they look not too bad from the front on the Lille Love doll, but from the back you can see that they are far too wide.

The pink heart dress is a dress made for Minikane dolls and is too baggy around the chest for the Lille Love doll. The red gingham dress is made for 32cm Miniland dolls and fits better around the chest. Unfortunately it is too tight around the neck and doesn't close very well at the back. The Little Baby Born doll is 36cm and looks quite slim, so maybe some Little Baby Born clothing would fit. Unfortunately I don't have any Little Baby Born clothing to try on the doll. At least he comes dressed in his own outfit.