Monday, January 9th, 2012...3:15 pm
Butterfly Beauty Shop
LEGO Friends Set 3187: Butterfly Beauty Shop
Manufacturer: LEGO
MSRP: $24.99
Availability: Mass retail, now
Website: Friends.Lego.com
I’ll be honest: I wasn’t expecting to buy this set.
After the ground-breaking Olivia’s Invention Workshop, a Beauty Shop just felt so… commonplace. So many girls’ toylines have beauty shops or boutiques, but how many have robots and power tools? But I was interested in getting a set with Emma in it.
Emma is the black-haired member of the LEGO Friends. Her interests are primarily focused around interior design, fashion design, jewelry design, makeovers, etc… but she’s also into horseback jumping, yoga, martial arts, and origami. Those latter two interests made me wonder if Emma was meant to be Asian, or just someone who’s interested in Asian cultures.
I was initially planning on getting Emma’s Design School (tiny sewing machine! giant ruler! humongous sandwich and adorable laptop!) but I hesitated when I saw that its general design was similar to Olivia’s Invention Workshop. I didn’t really want a pink-and-purple version of a set I’d already made…
…but the Butterfly Beauty Shop bugged me, what with the huge number of bright yellow accessories. I did my homework, and the LEGO Friends bios clearly state that Emma’s favorite color is purple! Stephanie is the one who likes yellow! I wanted purple accessories!
As soon as I realized that these accessories were actually functional (and that the set came with an extra hair piece), I was sold.
I’d noticed earlier that the LEGO Friends mini-dolls all had at least two holes in their hair pieces. At the time, I assumed that those were for child safety reasons (in case a child swallows a piece or gets it stuck in his or her windpipe). In fact, the holes allow various accessories to be attached to the mini-dolls as well as their various pets and animal companions!
The Butterfly Beauty Shop is composed of two major builds…
…two pink base plates…
…plus a bunch of stickers, which I opted not to apply.
The instruction booklet provides some helpful hints, such as not building these sets on the lawn, and not opening all the bags at once.
The first build took me about 20 minutes to build, with some interruptions.
The contents of the first bag result in the store front, a bench with flowers, and what is presumably meant to be a decorative fountain. I can’t help but see that as a blue flame, though.
Store… so empty…
The second bag contains the actual sign for the store, as well as most of the store contents and accessories. Again, it took me about 20 minutes to build everything.
I had a little bit of trouble with the hair piece model head. It’s a regular mini-figure head that mounts on to a funky little cone-shaped piece… but when I arranged it so that the wig fit the head…
…the head wouldn’t fit on the cone. I ended up flipping the cone upside-down, but apparently it was the head that I was supposed to reverse.
Because I didn’t add any of the stickers, the inside of the store looks a little plain… but there’s a rotating mirror, a rotating chair, a cash register, the afore-mentioned model head, a tub full of accessories, and tubes of lipstick in two window displays. There are also stickers that represent make-up for the window display, make-up to go under the standing mirror, and a sticker for the clear blue standee sign. I don’t get that last one, to be honest… the clear blue sign is so pretty, it seems like a waste to put a sticker on over it.
Incidentally, I love mini-doll Sarah’s asymmetrical top with the funky graphic design! It’s a pity that there aren’t more clothing options for the mini-dolls in general… I feel like there was a missed opportunity for a Fashion Show or Fashion Boutique set, complete with loads of torsos for mix-n-match fun. (The corresponding “torso-less skirts and pants with legs”, on the other hand, might have been a little unsettling.)
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