When it comes to identifying Barbie clothes shoes and dolls I like to say “Sources are a treasure.” Maybe I should say good sources are a fun treasure hunt instead! Because I do feel that thrill of discovery when I finally find the identity of a piece I’ve been searching for. But I don’t want to just see a shoe or shirt in a package, I want to know the year it was copyrighted, the catalog number, and the assortment number. This is one of the three things I appreciate most about Royalty.Girl’s blog.

The other two? Well just try and search the internet for “barbie clothes” “identify barbie” “what is this barbie dress” etc. and you will see one word over and over again. Vintage … vintage … vintage! That’s great for vintage collectors but I started my journey into adult doll collecting when I decided to rebuild my 1980’s childhood collection of playline Barbie. After finding flickr and other great sites like royalty-girl.blogspot.com I became interested in the late 2000s-2010s playline. You would think resources for these recent years would be easier to find, but not really. Mattel’s official customer service site service.mattel.com that has the information I like, item numbers, years, etc. but not for many years, and not even all the dolls/fashions/playsets for current years. The information they do have starts to thin out around 2012, yes that recently! But I will save that rant for a different post. This one is about the glorious Royalty.Girl. They provide beautiful clear crisp images of dolls and fashions inside the box, but also the back of the box that has the important information I like to have. Add to that the focus on 1980’s fashions and 2010’s dolls and fashions and royalty-girl.blogspot.com is a source tailor made for me!

One more thing I want to mention is the quality of the in-package photos. If you ever tried taking them or have seen them on Ebay you will notice the glare. Usually a bright white mark that seems to cover just the area you want to look closer at. The reason is obviously the flash from the camera the photographer used. I tried a couple different techniques using an actually good camera but can’t get result that match Royalty.Girl‘s. Their photos are consistently awesome. I have just posted a comparison between one of my photographs and theirs but I won’t put a link to that comparison post in this source post. Why? Because I work in the computer science field I actually know a little bit about how search engines like Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo work. So I don’t want my gross pictures to in anyway taint Royalty.Girl’s search engine results so to read the post you have to go click the News & Blog link above and then click Site News. This may seem weird, but I have a lot of sympathy for my fellow 1980’s and 2010’s Barbie collectors and I want to help them find great images like Royalty.Girl‘s so this is the way I’m doing that.

I highly recommend Royalty.Girl‘s website www.royalty-girl.blogspot.com especially if you are searching for 1980’s, 2000’s, and 2010’s dolls and fashions.

I haven’t added individual posts for all the Royalty.Girl images I have uploaded to my site yet, and it will probably take a while. But I don’t want to wait to add their beautiful images to my site so in the meantime I have created a gallery of images below. Once you take a look I am sure you will immediately head over to their blog. I can’t blame you!! I just ask you don’t forget about my little website and come back here every once in a while (okay I will stop begging now).

*I refer to all sources with they/them/their even when they use what seems like a definable male or female name, avatar, etc. I do this because I want to be respectful of people I don’t know and to respect the anonymity and privacy of others.