The Fairest of Them All: Apple White

Remember how I said I wasn't planning on buying anything new for a little while? Well, Toys R Us heard me and gasped, and scheduled a Buy One, Get One Free sale on Monster High and Ever After High this past weekend. That's not the kind of sale you can let pass by, especially with the prices the way they are up here in Canada! I got myself a few things, and it's possible that someone else socked a few away for me for my birthday... ;)

I got myself Apple White and Blondie Lockes, and now I'm very nearly done with the basic Ever After High characters! I just need to get my hands on Cupid, and as soon as that happens, I'm sure the next wave will start hitting stores, because that's how these things work. Today, I'm going to show you Apple White, who I find myself enjoying more than I expected I would. Snow White has never been one of my favourite fairy tales, starting when I was four and I ran out of the movie theatre when the Evil Queen sent the huntsman after Snow White, and refused to go back in no matter how much my mother tried to convince me she'd probably be fine. There's some baggage there, alright? 

Add to that her colour scheme of red, gold and white which isn't exactly my favourite, and originally, I thought I was going to be perfectly happy to pass Apple over, even though she's one of the main characters.

If you want to know what changed my mind, click through and read on!

First, let's have a quick look at Apple's box. Nothing new here if you're familiar with EAH boxes, but these boxes really are always lovely. The displays in the store definitely catch my eye and draw me in, and beckon to be picked up. The details go so well with the fairy tale aspects of the dolls, and I love that every inch of the box is carefully designed. I'm not, nor do I have any desire to be an in-box collector, but I totally get why people would want to be, when the boxes are this gorgeous!

Part of me wishes I had the space to keep the boxes and display them like this on a bookshelf! That would kind of be the best of both worlds, and the boxes are really easy to put back together if you happen to want to.

As soon as I got Apple out of her box, it was apparent she was going to need some help. On the left is her as she came out of the box, and on the right is after I did a little bit of work on her hair. From the front it's not quite as obvious how bad her "box hair" was, but we'll get to some more pictures in a little bit. Box hair is an affliction I'm quite familiar with as a Monster High collector, and I'm getting pretty good at dealing with it on dolls with both straight and curly hair.

Also as you can see, Apple comes with the standard Ever After High stuff. Her brush and stand (not pictured) are gold, and she comes with the little bookmark storybook. I always enjoy reading these little stories, especially since I've recently read both of the Ever After High books, and I've really fallen that much more in love with the world. Unlike the Monster High books (at least the ones by Lisi Harrison, which I've read), the Ever After High books take place in the same continuity at the webisodes and are designed to supplement them with stories and information they don't have time to tell in two and a half minutes. This is the real reason I decided to buy Apple's doll! In the webisodes, she can be somewhat one-note to me, as can some of the other characters, but the books add a lot of dimension and layers to the characters that I really appreciated! Even as an adult I got a great deal of enjoyment out of the books (The Storybook of Legends and The Unfairest of Them All, both by Shannon Hale) and I recommend you check them out, if you're even a little interested in Ever After High!

Anyway, back to the doll! Apple is really lovely, and has a very sweet face. Her skin is very fair, as is to be expected for the daughter of Snow White. Her brows are dark and pretty strong, and her eye makeup is done in a light smokey style in shades of taupe. Her eyes themselves are a beautiful bright blue. There's a slight flush to her cheeks, and her lips are painted in a deep pink, with three silver reflection dots on the lower lip. I would have expected her lips to be red, going along with the whole theme of Snow White, but then, Snow White wasn't blonde either! The pink does tie into her outfit as well, once we get a bit further down, otherwise it might have seemed a bit out of place with all this red.

On her head, Apple is wearing a red headband with a big bow on the front. Behind the bow is a gold crown, molded to look like tufted fabric. The headband is kind of woven into her hair, so if you removed it, you'd probably have to re-do her hair afterwards.

She's wearing tiny little bow earrings with a dangling bead, in the same gold as her crown. All of her jewellery is in this same colour.

Her necklace looks like a cluster of pearls, with a bow on one side.

Her ring is a simple gold bow.

And lastly, she has a molded gold cuff on one wrist. Her jewellery is pretty simple overall, but it feels right for her. Apple is a bit more about simple elegance I think, than someone like Maddie who likes to be playful, or Raven, who wears things with a bit more edge. Even though this is her daily look that she wears to school, Apple is already dressing like a classy queen!

And speaking of classy, Apple's outfit is very pretty without being over the top. She's wearing a dress with a fitted red bodice trimmed in black tulle, with a full skirt. The under skirt is a rich red patterned all over with a shiny, scrolling gold pattern. There are apples scattered randomly throughout this pattern. Over top of that, there's an overskirt made of two pieces that falls over each of her hips. It fades from white at the top to red at the bottom, with a deep pink in the middle. This is where her lipsticks ties in! These pieces were also printed with a pattern, though this one is more abstract leaves and vines, with a flower in the centre. They are also trimmed in the same black tulle as the top of her bodice. 

Finally, Apple is wearing a little white jacket with puffed sleeves, a high collar, and a gold quilted pattern.

A closer look at the pattern of the underskirt. The gold is so rich and shiny!

The jacket on its own. It's well-made for such a small piece, and has pretty neat seams.

And the dress without the jacket. It's worth noting that the bodice on Apple's dress doesn't seem to fit all that well on my doll. It's a bit loose, especially around the waist, and it has a tendency to slip and slide around, especially when trying to use the waist clip on her stand. This is probably an issue with my doll as opposed to a broader problem, but I thought it was worth a quick mention.

Apple is also wearing black net stockings. Ever After High makes some really nice stockings/tights for their dolls! On her feet, she's wearing red heels with three gold bows across the front.

The back of the heels are apples! I like how subtle the apple details are in her outfit. They could have easily taken it too far, but I think they took it just far enough.

Speaking of apples, we have her last accessory, her purse! It's a large red apple made to look as if it was made of beads, with a large gold leaf. The lid comes off, and all of her jewellery actually fits inside of it!

Now, on to her hair. As you can see in the picture on the left, right out of the box, Apple's hair was pretty flattened out, and looked really uneven along the bottom. Part of the unevenness is the way that it's styled, but most of was related to being smashed up against the cardboard of the box.

The picture on the right is after I did a bit of restyling. I simply washed out her hair to get out any excess styling product, and then while it was wet, I used my fingers to separate the curls and twirl them around my fingers to stretch them out and smooth them down a little. When it was dry, I ran my fingers through it to separate the curls until it looked how I wanted it to look, and voila! It was a pretty easy fix, as long as you remember to never, ever brush curly hair while it's dry. It's really hard to get the curl back after that!

So there she is! I'm glad that I read the books and developed a new appreciation for Apple, because her doll really is lovely. Even though her colour palette isn't my favourite, the colours really come to together and work for her!

And you can't pretend that her face isn't gorgeous! It's amazing to me how much I've come around on the Ever After High faces in the months since we first started seeing pictures. It helps that they have been making subtle changes to the face-ups and even the shape of the heads, but really, they're just lovely.

See? Lovely! I don't know if she's the fairest of them all, but she's definitely up there!

I found myself really wishing I had the black and red chair from the Monster High Coffin Bean set for these photos, but the Scaris Cafe chair had to do for now!

And with one final wave to her adoring subjects, Apple White bids you goodbye!

Coming up next, I actually have a guest post written by a friend of mine about one of her vintage collector Barbie's so stay tuned!