Hearts for Hearts Girls dolls are beautifully crafted multicultural dolls from Playmates Toys designed to inspire children to make a change in the world one heart at a time and teach them about the lives of kids from cultures around the globe. Each doll represents a real girl from a real place in the world where a community is in need and people can take action to help the community meet its challenges.
Designed to act as inspiring role models for young girls, these six 14-inch dolls are aimed at kids ages 6 and up, and a portion of the proceeds from each sale is donated to non-profit organizations that aid real-life children and families in regions that need help, with donations currently going to World Vision.
About Hearts for Hearts Girls dolls
When the chairman of Playmates Toys wanted to combine his philanthropic interest in helping the children of the world with his ability to make good-quality dolls, he approached doll designer Gina Beebe to see what sort of product she might create for him. Gina, who only works on projects about which she is passionate, then hand-picked and hired the best doll designer, writer, and researcher she knew to help her put together the look and the story for each doll in the Hearts for Hearts Girls doll line.
There are currently six Hearts for Hearts Girls dolls available, with plans to add at least two more in the future:
- Consuelo comes from Mexico City, loves pretty colors, and works to help the hungry and homeless children in her area.
- Lilian comes from Belarus and works to help Russian girls who are left in orphanages because their parents cannot care for them while working in the city.
- Dell comes from Kentucky's Appalachian Mountains, creates music and knitwear, and works to help others who need warm clothing.
- Rahel comes from Ethiopia, wants to be a doctor so she can tend to those in her community, and travels with her family to find aid for her people.
- Tipi comes from Laos, loves art and storytelling, and uses a mural contest to win money to buy books for her school.
- Nahji comes from Assam, India, and tries to inspire other girls to get educations instead of planning to pick tea leaves in the fields for a living.
Each doll currently comes with accessories like bracelets, earrings, necklaces, hair bands, removable shoes and clothing, and hair combs, as well as girl-sized H4H friendship bracelets that their owners can wear and mini-storybooks that tell about their homes, lives, and dreams. Playmates plans to release additional outfits and accessory sets in the future, probably around July 2011.
Each doll also comes with a code that allows girls to unlock a free online membership to the kid-safe Hearts For Hearts Girls website. Once there, kids can learn details about each doll, read entries from each doll's diary (diaries update regularly), play games themed to match the culture and lives of each girl, and read Real Girl Stories about actual children from around the world who have done inspirational things for their community. They can also set up a personalized myHeart page where they can record what they care about and some things they have done to help their own communities by picking from predetermined images, words, and sayings and completing statements such as "I wish all girls could have..." The myHeart page tracks a child's "donation level" by counting up how many dolls they have collected so far.
Hearts for Hearts Girls doll review
We were provided with a Tipi doll for this review, and our five-year-old tester began to beg to open Tipi's box as soon as the doll entered our house. The packaging for each Hearts for Hearts doll is as well-designed and detailed as the dolls themselves, with a front flap that can Velcro shut or be opened to reveal a scrapbook page of photographs and handwritten information about Tipi (including a description of her personality and real Laotian words written across the top). Inside the box, Tipi and her possessions are artfully arranged behind a clear plastic window. The cardboard behind Tipi is printed with a world map with Laos marked to indicate the country Tipi calls home.
Tipi comes with a cute removable outfit (detailed tee-shirt and cropped pants), a woven bracelet that is inspired by the Lao string bracelets of the Laotian culture, brightly colored rubber bands on her wrists that are supposed to stand for bangle bracelets but which can also be used to style Tipi's hair, a pink elastic band already wrapped in her hair, fancy silver and pink crystal earrings that can be stuck into holes in Tipi's ears, a pair of aqua flip-flops, a doll-sized hair comb with another elastic band, a H2H bracelet with two heart-shaped charms for Tipi's owner to wear, and a little storybook all about Tipi.
At 14-inches tall, this doll is the perfect size to be carried around in a young girl's arms. Girls and tweens will enjoy brushing and styling her hair and playing with her shoes and jewelry. The earrings are very small and the shoes do not always stay on, so parents may want to remove these parts and save them for later if the doll is to be given to a child on the younger side of the target age range.
Each H4H doll has an individual face full of personality, and our tester has fallen in love with her doll. Once a child has connected with Tipi or one of her friends, parents can help them read the nicely designed mini-storybook and guide the child around the H4H website to begin to interest the child in the doll's background and, eventually, how the child herself can make a difference in the world.
Not only can children from a variety of backgrounds find a doll in this line whose appearance mirrors their own, but the multicultural diversity on display here is richer and deeper than a line of toys where the designers just change a few surface features from doll to doll to indicate which doll is to be the Latina one, the Asian one, or the African-American one. A huge amount of painstaking research has gone into fleshing out the histories and characters of these dolls and making sure that each one is unique, authentically designed, and true to the experiences of the girls who live in the culture from which the doll is supposed to originate.
Parents that purchase a Hearts for Hearts Girls doll for their children should be prepared for their daughters to immediately start clamoring to collect the rest of the set. Luckily, the price is reasonable. Each doll should retail for just under $25. Better yet, even though the dolls are offered at affordable prices, Gina made sure that the materials used to construct each doll are of the best quality and that the details of their clothing and other accessories are nicely finished, with no corners cut.
We received the Tipi doll for review, but Chicago families are fortunate that our city is the test market for introducing Hearts for Hearts Girls Dolls into brick-and-mortar retail stores. Buyers for all of the major toy store retailers had already finished their purchases for the holiday 2010 season when the dolls were ready to be introduced to the public, but the quality and message of the dolls impressed the buyers from Target and Toys R Us so much that select locations of each of these stores around Chicago will be carrying them on their shelves. Families can visit the Hearts For Hearts Girls website for a complete listing of retail stores that are selling them, or purchase them online from the Toys R Us and Target websites.
Check out our interview with Gina Beebe, the doll's designer, to learn more about the creation of these multicultural and empowering toys, and read an account of the recent World Vision essay contest, which awarded Hearts for Hearts Girls dolls as prizes to Chicago public school students.
Families interested in Hearts for Hearts Girls dolls may also like to read about Global Green Pals eco-educational dolls, Adorable Kinders Rag Dolls, or the new Innerstar University virtual world for My American Girl dolls.
Read more doll reviews or all Chicago Children's Toys Examiner toy and game reviews.
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