Cry Babies dolls that cry real tears, room by room

Cry Babies dolls: real tears, soft cuddles and a world to explore

Cry Babies are baby dolls built around one idea: a baby doll that can actually cry. Fill the reservoir, take the pacifier out of her mouth, and real tears run from her eyes — on the big interactive dolls lit from inside so they catch the light. Each baby has a name, a face and a set of emotions she expresses in ten to thirty-five baby sounds, and soothing her is the play. Children who come to the line through the cartoon already know half the cast by heart, which is why the collection works less like a toy and more like a world with a newborn in every corner.

The world splits into families, and the families are what the nine rooms of this shelf follow. Twelve-inch interactive babies — Mindy wanting a specific food, Bella working through a morning routine, Jenna with her baby monitor — fill the Nursery Floor. Soft Tiny Cuddles dolls, plush from the neck down and cute enough to sleep next to, live in the Crib: nine inches of cuddles, pink pyjamas, no batteries anywhere, tears by water and a squeeze. The Attic holds Magic Tears capsules, where a mini doll arrives with a magic bottle, a pacifier and seven or more accessories drawn from a pool of a dozen characters, Jumpy Monsters included. The Parlour furnishes them: houses with elevators, an igloo, a kitchen. The Fashion Landing is where the babies grow up into BFF dolls with nylon hair and unboxable wardrobes, and the Porch keeps the cribs, travel seats and doll outfits.

Picking one is mostly a question of age and noise. An infant or an eighteen-month-old wants a soft baby doll with a single removable piece; a three-year-old is ready for sequences, routines and the unwrapping of a surprise; four and up unlocks the wardrobes, the unicorn with the light-up horn and the playsets with twenty-five pieces of furniture. Everything in between — heights in inches, what activates the tears, how many friends a doll has in her series, which accessories are in the box — sits printed on the card beside her photographs, next to the price read off the live listing and the stars her owners left. Open the room that matches the afternoon you are shopping for, and the collection stops being forty lookalike listings and starts being a family of dolls you can tell apart.

It is worth saying plainly what a cry baby doll is, because the phrase is used loosely. A cry baby doll is a baby doll toy built so that water leaves her eyes on cue: she is not a reborn, she is not silicone, and she does not breathe or crawl on her own unless the box says she walks. Every cry baby doll in this house works on one of two mechanisms, and nothing else about her is pretending. The soft ones are a cry baby doll with a plush body; the capsules are a cry baby doll the size of a thumb; the interactive ones are a cry baby doll with a speaker and a motor behind the face. If you came looking for a doll toy that cries real tears rather than a doll toy that simply makes a crying noise, that distinction is the one that matters.

Clothes run through the whole collection and they are easy to underestimate. On the interactive babies the clothes come off — a hooded pyjama suit, a bib, a pair of soft shoes — and the doll clothes from one twelve-inch baby fit the next one, so a child with two babies has four outfits. On the plush babies the clothes are sewn on and stay on, which is the right choice for a baby doll toy that gets carried by one arm. In the capsules the clothes are the surprise itself: a dress, a hat and a pair of shoes that swap between every mini in the series. The Fashion Landing takes doll clothes further still, with wardrobes that unbox into hangers, and the Pajama Drawer turns the pattern around and puts the clothes on the child instead of the doll.