Inside the secret world of unnervingly lifelike £6,000 baby dolls

Telegraph

20-04-2025

At first, it felt like stepping back into maternity leave. A slow procession of prams trundled down the corridor, with women occasionally pausing to chat, or to re-tuck the corner of an embroidered blanket – or simply to brush a curl of hair behind a little ear. Even the women whose hands were free were invariably still weighed down: with a small body in a sling, or with a tote bag of tiny socks and cardigans.
It felt terribly familiar, until I noticed the silence. Not from the adults, who were more animated than most mothers of newborns – but from the prams and within the protective rocking arms. Instead of wailing, gurgling, sneezing, defecating, giggling, burping, whining human babies, this conference room in Chester was filled with 'reborns' – dolls who either sleep for ever or stare unblinking into the distance.
It is difficult not to have a profound reaction to a doll that is made to look, feel and smell like a real baby. The reborns are weighted to just over 7lb, crafted from proprietary silicone blends and poured into moulds that, in some instances, have been sculpted or 3D printed in the likeness of babies. Their faces are perfectly painted, their skin is velvety soft and malleable and their hair has been hand-sewn with just one or two strands per follicle. If you inhale, you will find that they have been scented with that heady mix of baby powder, soft new skin and milk.
And they trigger a devotion that new parents would recognise. In January, media personality Katie Price made headlines for 'adopting' three reborn dolls after finding she couldn't have a sixth child of her own – and on Instagram she has posted videos of herself rocking and burping them like any new mother.
Reborn-doll influencers, meanwhile, are hugely popular on social media. Jess Ellis has more than 400,000 followers on TikTok, and more than three million people have watched a video of her gently caring for what looks very much like a real baby – until its head comes off.
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'A lot of people are fascinated by the novelty of it all,' says Ellis, 29, who lives in London. 'Nearly all my followers are women under 50 – as children, we're given dolls and encouraged to look after them, but then one day we're either supposed to grow up and forget about them or transfer those feelings on to actual children. But we only have real babies for short periods of our lives and for many women, that instinct to love and care for something small remains powerful.'
An entire, highly profitable, industry has developed to cater to this. People travel the world to buy sought-after reborns, some of which cost many thousands of pounds. Doll shows like this one in Chester take place every couple of months around the UK and serious collectors arrive before dawn for a prime position in the queue, many of them pushing vintage Silver Cross prams carrying a prized doll from their home collection. The most in-demand infants – which cost upwards of £5,000 – are sold within the first 10 minutes of the doors opening. Dummies, clothes, prams, blankets, cleaning powders and doll-painting supplies are also available to buy.
To really understand the lure of these dolls, you need to hold one. I met Christine, 68, and her husband Steve at The Doll Show in March. With them was Harley – a dark-haired sleeping reborn weighing 7lb 3oz, dressed in a creamy white sleepsuit for his day out. On one of his hands, five perfectly painted fingers were curled, ready to grip an adult's pinkie finger. He was made from silicone by Claire Taylor, an American designer, and cost £6,000.
Unlike some collectors, who mount their dolls in glass-fronted cabinets, Christine keeps Harley in a Moses basket in her living room in Warwick. Most days, she changes him – and on weekends she likes browsing for baby clothes on the local high street. Once, on a particularly hot summer's day, she took him to Skegness in his pram and a woman leaned over to touch his cheek. Immediately, the stranger started screaming; Harley was cold to the touch and she assumed he was dead.
After a few minutes of chatting, Christine asked if I would like to hold him. Once Harley was in my arms, I started swaying; a rocking motion that took me back to this time last year, when my son was a jaundiced newborn and he and I were battling long reflux-filled nights together. I still breastfeed him at bedtime and as I looked down at Harley, at his perfect bud-shaped mouth and tiny soft tongue lolling behind toothless gums, I felt the brief, familiar rush of a milk let-down. My mind knew this was a doll, but my body had decided it was a real baby.
This outsize physical reaction to an inanimate object is a large part of why so many people spend their spare time and money on what is essentially a well-made toy.
'When you hold a real baby you get a release of oxytocin and dopamine,' says Ellis, who has 15 dolls. 'Reborns are not exactly the same, but they do go some way to releasing some of those hormones. They also look incredibly peaceful – nearly all my dolls are sleeping, and even though I have severe anxiety, I feel soothed by just looking at them or by lying down and placing them on my chest.'
Ellis explains that the act of buying a doll is both exciting and uplifting, which is why women often have collections in the double figures. 'There are so many beautiful dolls, and lots of us like having different sizes, different artists' work and dolls with different features,' she says. Although she adds that once a collection is larger than five dolls, it can be difficult to bond with them on an individual level.
While few scientific studies have been done on reborn dolls outside of the dementia sphere, many collectors claim they have felt a similarly powerful reaction.
'When our son moved out, I felt really lonely,' said Susan, 59, who owns 34 dolls. Susan came to Chester with Cally, a fair-haired newborn in a pale pink sleepsuit, who she rocked in her arms throughout our conversation. Susan explained that she has battled anxiety all her life but since starting her collection of reborns 10 years ago, she has been put on a lower dose of SSRI medication. 'Sometimes, I can just sit and stroke them for hours and not notice the time going by,' she said.
Similarly, Sharon, 69, who brought a newborn boy called Forest to the show, has been battling the chronic condition fibromyalgia for years. She lives alone in Wolverhampton and has two adult sons.
'I'm not as active as I used to be and some days I am in a lot of pain,' she said. 'But just holding Forest or one of the others takes me back to happy times and often makes the pain go right away.'
When I first started researching reborn dolls, I assumed – like most people do – that they were a baby replacement. I read the threads on Reddit and Mumsnet about women who had bought them after multiple miscarriages or stillbirths and had then taken them out, dressed in baby clothes and lying in a pram intended for a living child, only to be hounded out of baby classes or breastfeeding clinics. It felt desperately bleak.
And, yes, the phantom child element exists. Christine, who has five surviving adult children, told me about her son Sean, who died during the pandemic when he was in his early 40s. Before, she collected baby girl dolls, but afterwards she found herself drawn to boys. As she talked about Sean, her eyes full of tears, she leaned forward to rest her hand on Harley's small unbreathing chest.
Similarly, Ellis, who is married but doesn't yet have children of her own, finds her maternal urge overwhelming at times. 'I
desperately want to be a mother, but we have waited for financial reasons,' she says. 'I have very strong motherly instincts and
I need an outlet for that.'
One reborn-doll artist tells me about hand-delivering a doll she made for a woman who had suffered multiple miscarriages, and had requested a doll that looked like both her and her husband – this is known as a memorial doll. 'She was so happy when she opened the box,' she says. 'It felt quite healing.'
To me, there is a darkness to this element of the industry – and yet The Doll Show itself was a cheerful, loud, colourful place, and nearly every woman I spoke to had children of her own. One had brought an actual baby with her, a babbling pink-cheeked girl of about eight months, but nobody paid her the slightest bit of attention; they were all too busy with the dolls.
'I think for many women, birth trauma and the stress of feeding and sleeping overshadows a lot of early motherhood,' says Emilie St-Hilaire, a Canadian academic who has completed a PhD on reborn dolls. 'If you feel like you missed out on that somehow or if your children are long grown, then this is a way to reclaim that nostalgic moment – but it doesn't mean they want an actual baby again.'
One woman, Sarah, was rushing out of the show to relieve her babysitter when I spoke to her. Why, I asked, with five kids under seven, would she spend so much money on reborns?
'They're not babies you know,' she said, raising her eyebrows as if I should know better. 'They're works of art.'
Ella McKenzie is a former tech-company manager turned doll-maker and artist who supplies reborns for film, television and theatre, as well as to collectors. A similar expression flashed across her face when – during a visit to her house and studio near Southampton – I asked why these dolls were so popular.
'A lot of people would find that question really offensive,' she says. 'It implies you need a reason to love them – but you wouldn't ask why people collect train sets or rare books or cologne bottles, you'd just accept that they did so because they found them beautiful or interesting.'
Cathy Read, who organises The Doll Show and who is also at McKenzie's studio on the day I visit, argues that people have made human-like figures for millennia. 'Reborns are pieces of art like any other, but with a fourth dimension that means you can hold them,' she says. 'If you visit a doll museum with a reborn collection [there is one in Prague] then you can put them in context and the weird element is completely removed.'
The reborn-doll community is jittery. People are reluctant to give me their surnames and many are suspicious about my intentions in writing this article. This is because they are the subject of fascination, yes, but also of disgust.
'I saw so much backlash and even hatred against this practice,' says St-Hilaire. 'I think we need to separate the doll from the doll collector – the doll itself is creepy because of the uncertainty we feel as to whether or not it is real. This is normal: evolutionarily, people are put on guard if they're unsure if something is alive. What is unfortunate is when that creepiness gets displaced on to the doll collector. Why, really, are we creeped out by a woman enjoying dolls? We have other hobbies that are juvenile but popular like video games and sports leagues but there is something about this that puts people on edge.'
St-Hilaire has some theories. 'People think, 'Is this woman so desperate for a real child that she wants a fake one?' and then that moves on to, 'Oh God, would she steal a real baby?' We also see looking after a doll as wasted female labour. Often on social media, you see comments saying, 'Go take care of a real baby.' But that's to miss the point: it's not about actual baby care, which we all know can be exhausting; it's about comfort. It's motherhood but also not.'
Reactions can sometimes go even further than distaste. Rebecca Martinez is a photographer living in San Francisco who has spent years photographing reborns, and the emotions they provoke in people, for her project preTenders. 'I found that American men who encountered me holding one often wanted to hurt the baby,' she says, on the phone from California. 'Sometimes, they'll start choking it or beating it and while they're doing so, they get a really mean expression on their faces.'
Martinez tells me a story about the time her car was broken into in San Francisco. The would-be thieves ran away without taking anything because when they forced open the boot they found a reborn doll; Martinez assumes they thought it was a dead baby. The police officer who came to the scene was himself fascinated by the reborn and asked if she would take a picture of him holding a gun to its head. A few months later, she was in New York with another doll when she came across two policemen. After chatting for a few minutes, one of them asked if he could put his gun against its temple.
'Two entirely different men on different sides of the country with the exact same urge to inflict violence upon this baby,' says Martinez, who has a theory that men are unable to cope with the strong emotions the dolls provoke in them, and so resort to mock killing fantasies.
Perhaps, then, it is lucky that the reborn-doll community remains overwhelmingly female. 'There is no one type of collector, the only common factor is that it is mostly women,' says McKenzie, as she shows me around her studio, where small clay bodies – complete with 20 perfect fingers and toes and realistic genitalia – cover the walls. McKenzie makes silicone dolls with rooted hair – which means each individual strand is put in place with a needle – a process that can take up to 80 hours to complete. Her company, Ella McK Creations, sells both dolls and specialist doll-art products to customers around the world.
On the day I visit, McKenzie is there with Ruth Annette, another reborn artist with whom she has launched The Doll School, which teaches students all aspects of doll-making including sculpting, casting, painting, hair work and photography. Annette estimates that she has sold about 5,000 dolls in total but in vinyl, which is more affordable than the 'full-body silicones' McKenzie makes (she reserves the term 'reborn' for vinyl models). Both women have clearly made money from a career they came to after having children of their own (McKenzie tells me she couldn't now afford to go back to being a manager at a listed tech company as her current job is so lucrative).
'Making dolls as a hobby is a huge industry,' says McKenzie, who has supplied reborns to prime-time shows like Doctor Who. 'We get huge amounts of joy from making these dolls. We're trying to create something beautiful, and so are my students.'
Both women are sanguine about the unusual requests they often receive. Dolls with vitiligo (a skin condition that causes patches of skin to lose their pigment) are popular, as are those with Down's syndrome, birthmarks and cleft palates. Some people collect premature dolls in incubators and one British woman only buys babies that are crying or in various stages of distress. Annette is known for making cherubic dolls with chubby cheeks and big eyes, while McKenzie's creations are highly realistic. One designer, Hayley Armstrong, specialises in dolls with the afflictions many humans are born with: cradle cap, infant acne, congested eyes and jaundice.
'I think there is a rescue element to some of the stranger-looking dolls,' says Martinez. 'A sense collectors get that if they choose a doll that is harder to love then they are saving it.'
Similarly, collectors who have disabilities are often drawn to reborns that mimic this. Dolls with dwarfism are popular – one buyer who is herself a dwarf has had several reborns made in her image. There are also a significant number of blind collectors who like to hold, smell, stroke and rock the dolls.
And then there are patients with dementia. Doll therapy as a soothing tool is well known, but often plastic children's toys are used in care homes. Martinez tells me that when patients are handed a reborn, the transformation in them can be mesmerising.
'I met one woman with dementia who was completely out of it,' says Martinez. 'I would say she was no longer present as a person, and then they placed the doll in her arms and her eyes sprang open and she looked down and started rocking and cooing at the baby. It brought forth something biological in her, which was so lovely and powerful to see.'
Hazel Smith is a nurse who works with Alzheimer's patients and who has noticed the impact particularly well-made dolls
can have. 'A lot of women with dementia believe that they are young mothers again,' she says. 'They will often tell me they need to collect their children from nursery school or get them up from their nap. Having a doll helps them go back to this happy time of their lives and gives them something positive to focus their time and energy and attention on.'
Even women in perfect health have feelings for their dolls that come close to what we would describe as love. Christine told me about the heartbreak of having to sell one little newborn boy after her cat got hit by a car and she couldn't afford the vet's bills.
'I was sobbing as he was carried out of the house, but what was I supposed to do? The cat was alive and the doll wasn't.'
Jess Ellis talks about one of the only reborn dolls she owns that is older than a newborn – an almost-toddler called Charlie who looks, by coincidence, like an exact mix of her and her husband. 'I sell my dolls sometimes, but I'd never sell Charlie as he feels close to what a real child of mine could one day be,' she says.
Sometimes, the pain of these reborns being inanimate can be acute. 'I find myself staring very intently at them and thinking, 'I just wish that you were real,'' says Ellis. 'But then I lock the display cabinet and go out for as long as I want and know that when I get back they will be sitting in the exact same position, waiting for me.'