Right: Baby “Suri,” because of course the Reborn movement has some sort of weird overlap with the Scientologists.
“Reborn” baby dolls! According to several reports from the mainstream media, real women have taken to carting around these not-really-real-yet-frighteningly realistic human baby dolls in order to fill the aching void left by their own lack of children/poor mothering jobs/dementia. It’s true, confirms “Linda,” a mother to Reborn babies but no real children:
“It’s not a crazy habit, like, you know, drinking, or some sort of, something that’s going to hurt you. It’s like a hobby, and it doesn’t really hurt anybody,” Linda told WJLA.
Lachelle Moore, who has a full first and last name, provided an more coherent, yet somehow crazier, quote to the press. “What’s so wonderful about Reborns is that, um, they’re forever babies,” said Moore. Yep, that is crazy!
Too expensive (up to $4,000 a Reborn!) to be purchased ironically, these dolls must be marketed and sold to women who truly appreciate the meticulous crafting of these baby dolls, which may very well be more time-consuming than growing a real human. The Reborns’ hair “is rooted in the head strand by strand, a process that can take 30 hours,” the Today Show reported. “To add realism, some purchasers opt for a heartbeat and a device that makes the chest rise and fall to simulate breathing.”
Well, I am sold and now ready to spend over a month’s salary on this. Now all that remains is for me to pick out a creepily realistic non-real baby for adoption. Let’s get Reborn! Below, an annotated gallery of Reborn babies:
There’s something particularly soul-crushing about staring into the bright, wide eyes of a baby human being and knowing full well that it took some crazy woman in Scotland 30 hours to sew each individual hair into its scalp.
Why is every single one of these Reborns Caucasian as the driven snow? Oh, I know, because some crazy lady heard on FOX News that in the future there will be no pure white people and everyone will be a Mixed so we need to preserve the memory of our Hwhaaite Babies by carefully calibrating their birth weights and placing magnets inside their mouths to replicate pacifier suckling, the way white people do it, as G-d intended. Okay, makes sense!
I wonder if real Reborn enthusiasts commission babies to estimate what their son or daughter would have looked like with, you know, their highschool sweetheart or their Blockbuster video clerk or whatever? Oh, nevermind, of course they do. Baby “Ella” here has your hair, but Valued Team Member “Jason”s eyes!
Baby “Maddie,” for those who always wanted to birth a baby-sized18th-century Dandy Fop but simply never had the time.
Baby “Natasha,” specifically crafted for those moms who want their Reborns to appear Re-dead, already!
Photos via reborn-baby.com