Hair Apparent: In Midtown, Doll Mania
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The hair on the plastic heads of the American Girl dolls is made of Kanekelon, a synthetic fiber that is widely used for wigs and hairpieces for African-American women. The substance fares best when it is left alone. In the event of a tangle it can be combed through, ever so gently. Bristle brushes, steam, and heat are best avoided. The wig purveyor deviouswig.com even counsels Kanekelon customers against wearing their wigs in the kitchen, telling home cooks who are dead set on keeping their wigs on, “When you open the oven make sure to stand to the side and do not stand near the opening until all the heat has left the area.” In the face of all that wisdom, the American Girl company has set up a doll hair salon, where a girl can have her doll’s tresses “done” for $10, $15, or $20, depending on the ‘do. The store also sells American Girl hair-care books, for $7.95 (“stylist secret: rubber bands for braces work best”), and American Girl hairbrush-and-accessories packages, for $14.95. Instead of the mousse cans and gel bottles that typically litter the countertops of hair salons, American Girl’s doll stylists have to make do with soft-bristled toothbrushes, water spritzers, and canisters of orthodontic rubber bands.
The company set up its first salon in its Chicago flagship store in 2000.”We’d be cleaning up dolls for girls anyways, it seemed the natural thing to do,” said a spokeswoman for American Girl, Stephanie Spanos. At the New York store the wait for an appointment at the salon can be up to three hours.
Economic reports say holiday sales this year have been ho-hum, but you wouldn’t know it by stepping into the 43,000-square-foot American Girl Place in Rockefeller Center. The brand’s popularity can partly be attributed to the American Girl movie that aired on WB over Thanksgiving weekend – twice.
Girls, often dressed up as if to go see “The Nutcracker,” race around in flocks, their dolls clutched to their chests. The sugary energy pulsates out onto the street, where star shows play on the walls of neighboring buildings and street vendors, standing in the cold, hawk bags of cotton candy.
The hair salon is in a back corner on the first floor. Six stylists, who all appear to be only a few years older than the clientele, stand in a row, working on dolls seated in miniature barbershop chairs. Everything plays out atop a lilac counter that’s a perfect height for leaning on if you happen to be 4 feet, 2 inches.” In the background are cubbies with dolls in messy stacks, like logs about to be tossed into the fire. “That’s the waiting room,” a stylist said.
The stylists make sure to keep the dolls facing the audience, so each girl with her mom can watch her doll undergo the transformation. “It’s awesome,” Anne-Sophie Lombard, a chic Parisian, said as she looked on with her 5-year-old daughter, Apoline. “We don’t have anything like this in Paris.”
The stylists aren’t actually certified hairstylists. They’re employees who have undergone a two-day doll-hairstyling course. “It’s like performance,” one stylist said. “A lot of us are actors or singers. You have to always be happy, you have to talk to the kids.”
On a recent evening, most of the stylists were moving at a productive pace, but one, Lisa, was stuck working on a blonde doll whose dull, tangled hair refused to change shape. The poor doll looked as though she’d seen better days: There was a grayness to her face, a slackness to her neck. A clump of bang-length blonde hair shot up straight from the crown of her head toward the ceiling.
“Sometimes it can take an hour,” Lisa said. “We get a lot of dreadlocks, a lot of tangly hair. Or the girls will cut bobs.”
“My doll has a bob!” a 7-year-old girl with a sugar-plummy London accent interjected. She looked sad and lost, with her long, dreamy eyelashes, fancy navy coat, and nary a parent in sight. “My nanny gave my doll a bob,” she informed us. “My nanny did it.”
There are scores of American Girl dolls, many of whom come with dazzling historical eras and circumstances: Kirsten Larson’s a bonneted pioneer from 1854, while Addy Walker is a gutsy African-American who escapes to Philadelphia during the Civil War. Life stories aside, the brand uniformly has chubby-cheeked faces with wide, dilated eyes, which lend the dolls a flat, frozen quality.
Still, kids love them. American Girl dolls sell second only to the sexier Barbie. Both lines are owned by Mattel. American Girl, introduced in 1986 as a politically correct alternative to Barbie, gained ground as a mail-order phenomenon. The company has sold more than 10 million dolls, and its bimonthly magazine boasts more than 10,000 pieces of reader mail per issue.
The girls come to the New York salon, which opened last year, for the dolls, yes, but also for the ready-made fantasy. It is a place that understands their dolls and doesn’t ask much of the girls’ imaginations. This is a part of the real world where nobody will look at you funny if you spend $400 on doll clothing and bedding. There’s a hard-to-get-into cafe, where girls sip tea with their dolls and where, to facilitate girl-doll talking, there are boxes with “conversation starter” cards on the tables. “Do you prefer mittens or gloves and why?” “Would you rather be smart, athletic, or pretty?”
There’s also a theater, which on Friday afternoon staged the “Hair salon spectacular,” a $25-a-ticket, 45-minute event. The theater has a purple stage and a ceiling drowning in lights and wires. The girls sat in the front row, their dolls perched on their knees. Moms and a couple of younger brothers hung back in more distant seats.
Using a sickly sweet baby voice that would probably offend any 8-year-old girl unaccustomed to dressing up to match her doll, a stylist named Elizabeth gave the girls a few tips, such as to keep their dolls out of the sun and not to use scissors. She led the group through the “ponytail flip” style, then showed a photograph of a doll with a more complicated and popular “veil” style, urging, “You’ve got to come to the salon.”
Asked if she thought the “spectacular” was worth the price of admission, Kathy Hoffman of Philadelphia, whose 11-year-old, Alexa, had attended, said, “Nothing here is worth what it costs.” The mom, who was carrying a bag with $400 of merchandise, recalled coming a year ago for a five-person, $250-per-capita theater-and-brunch afternoon. “It was a fortune and we were starved when we left,” she said. Still, Alexa and her friend Stephanie Vincent, 12, were dying to go back to their hotel room to do their dolls’ hair. “I don’t like Barbie as much,” Stephanie said. “She’s not bendable. I tried to do a flip on her and her head came off.”
Mothers say they like American Girl dolls because they’re more wholesome than their tiny-waisted counterparts. The American Girl dolls come with books explaining their life stories, which tend to illustrate spunk and strength. An Upper East Side mother, Jocelyn Markowitz, whose 8-year-old, Hannah, has fallen hard for the dolls, said, “There’s not enough role models who are strong enough to stand up for things. I’d rather she read about girls who are like Eleanor Roosevelt than Barbie.”
Having spent the better part of a week at American Girl Place, I can’t say I’m convinced. I saw girls mugging for pictures with their newly coiffed dolls. I saw girls trying on long purple coats with white trim to match their dolls’ attire. I didn’t see much laughing, however, and I didn’t see anything that reminded me of Eleanor Roosevelt.
Instead, Barbie’s appeal has unearthed itself to me and grown like a beanstalk. First, she’s more accessible – well, cheaper than the American Girl dolls, which go for about $90. Second, she is who she is. Barbie’s a doll, a blank slate free of prescribed dialogue or a script. Sure, there are Barbie storybooks, but they come and go and are scarcely required reading. We don’t really know who Barbie is, apart from a limber piece of plastic who will take on any tale the imagination concocts. One day she’ll be a forest ranger, the next an astronaut. Anything goes with Barbie. Free of the burden of trying to keep their facts straight, kids can dream up whatever narrative they please. To think of the possibilities!