The orange, blue, pink and green coloured eye chips of a Blythe doll can be replaced with other colours, or foiled and rimmed for a 'deeper' expression.
There are some tutorials and tons of information about how to do this on the Internet, but this is what I did:
I tied all my dolls hair back, placed damp cotton balls on her eyeballs and left them there for an hour or two.
Caution: the original Takara eyelashes are held together with water-soluble glue, and longer contact with water will easily mess them up, or worse: they'll just fall right out!
Because I wanted to replace them anyway I used a tweezer to pull them out of the small gap in the eyelids. Then I used a pin to remove the old glue that was left behind as well.
(If you want to keep the eyelashes, because you've already replaced the old ones with other (human) lashes, prevend them to come straight off with the glue by using a small piece of scotch magic tape to tape them up to your dolls forehead.)
I used a 11 mm size glue stick (Bison) and heated one end for a few seconds using a lighter. Didn't make it too gooey, because the glue shouldn't spread out too much when put on the chip.
After it was melted, I pressed the stick strongly on the eyechip and held it like that for a few minutes while it cooled.
I left it alone for another 15 minutes to really firm up.
Then, holding my dolls head, I yanked the glue stick with force and.. nothing happened!
The stick just came off without the chip.. So it took about five tries, pulling harder and harder with less caution, and finally the first chip popped right out!
I learned that the eye chips are glued in the socket, what makes it hard to get the chip out, especially the side glancing chips.
When you really can't get a chip out, try to soak the whole dolls head in warm water for at least an hour. The water will soften the glue in the sockets and the eyechips should pop out faster.
To get the chip off of the glue stick just carefully use your fingernails to go around the edge and slowly pry it off. Don't use any sharp objects or you will scratch the chip!
Now repeat this for all of the chips. I used two glue sticks at a time, one for each eye, so I didn't have to wait so long in between pulling and trying again.
(It could happen to Superior Blythe (SBL) eyes that when a chip is pulled out, the socket glue damages the black painted 'pupil' on the back of the chip. Not to worry: just repaint it with black acrylic paint.)
Excellent Blythe (EBL) eyes are 'hollow' inside, they don't have a bottom the chips are glued onto, as you can see in the picture.
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