Inappropriate gifts for girlfriend skin#

As this price suggests, the dolls were marketed to adults, mainly men, as a joke or gag gift at tobacconists, kiosks and newsagents that normally sold flowers, chocolates and other small giftware. Originally the tall dolls cost DM 12, the small DM 7.50 at a time when average monthly take-home pay was DM 200 to DM 400. Martha Maar, the mother-in-law of the Hausser company owner. Each Lilli doll carried a miniature copy of Bild and was sold in a clear plastic tube, with the doll's feet fitted into the base of a stand labelled 'Bild-Lilli' that formed the bottom of the tube the packaging was designed by E. The cartoon Lilli was blonde, but a few of the dolls had other hair colours. Her limbs were attached inside by coated rubber bands. She wore her hair in a ponytail with one curl on the forehead.

Inappropriate gifts for girlfriend skin#

The doll was made of plastic and had molded eyelashes, pale skin and a painted face with side glancing eyes, high narrow eyebrows and red lips. She held three patents, features absolutely new in doll-making: the head and neck were not one form connected with a seam at the shoulders, but rather the seam was mid-neck, behind the chin the hair was not rooted, but a cut-out scalp that was attached by a hidden metal screw the legs did not sprawl open when she was sitting. īild Lilli was available in two sizes: 30 cm (12 in) and 19 cm (7.5 in). Weissbrodt designed a prototype doll based on Beuthien's cartoons, which was sold from 1955 to 1964 that year Mattel acquired the rights to the doll and German production stopped.

In 1953, the newspaper decided to market a Lilli doll and contacted Max Weissbrodt of the toy company O&M Hausser in Neustadt bei Coburg. Lilli was a German cartoon character created by Reinhard Beuthien for the German tabloid Bild.

Mattel acquired the rights to Bild Lilli in 1964, and production of the German doll ceased, in favor of Mattel's new vinyl doll, which they called Barbie. The Lilli doll was copied, and altered to some degree, for Mattel upon the direction of that company's co-founder, Ruth Handler. The doll was made of polystyrene, came in two sizes, and had an available wardrobe of 1950s fashion. Its design was based on the comic-strip character Lilli, created by Reinhard Beuthien for the tabloid newspaper Bild. The Bild Lilli doll was a West German line of fashion doll launched by Greiner & Hausser GmbH on August 12, 1955, and produced until 1964.