Not To Be Toyed With.

Siberian-born Marina Bychkova’s immaculate Enchanted Dolls wield world-weary attitude, bristling sexuality, fully fleshed-out backstories, and better clothes than you.

Feast your eyeballs, for example, on “Agnetha: The Other Woman,” above, her maker’s only-one-in-existence, 13 1/2” tall, ball-jointed, china-painted, porcelain princess. As many of the dolls are inspired by fairy tales and fantasy, this one is inspirited by the nameless monarch’s daughter, caught between the Prince and Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. Notes Bychkova on Agnetha,

As a child I had always sympathized with her involuntary situation and wondered about what that princess looked like and why the Prince choose her over the Mermaid. I wanted to name that nameless Other Woman and give her a face.

She sure gave her more than that. According to Bychkova, making every doll, right, requires the following process:

1. Sculpt 13 body pieces in polymer clay.
2. Design and test the ball joints.
3. Make molds of every piece.
4. Pour the pieces in porcelain.
5. Low fire at 1375° F
6. Clean, sand down parts
7. High fire at 2205° F
8. Sand down parts to satin finish
9. First China layer and fire
10. Second China layer and fire

Repeat this at least 2 more times

11. Glue leather into ball joints
12. String the doll with springs
13. Make costume

Doing this “takes anywhere from 150 to 350 hours, depending on the complexity of the costume,” and, as you can tell from the accompanying photos, Agnetha’s complexity borders on the mathematical. She took over 210 hours to make. Fashioning her gown alone, right, required 1,158 freshwater pearls, 698 Austrian crystals, 105 garnets, fifty-three amethysts, six rubies, four sapphires, five moonstones, Indian silk, and Indian wire embroidery.

As she should be, Agnetha is presently on exhibition. If you can’t live without her, though, and assuming someone else doesn’t speak for her first, expect her to set you back about $14,000.

Believe me: I have no interest in dolls whatsoever, and, if I had the free dough, I’d plunk it down immediately for as many of them as I could carry out. Her art is worth every penny. The purity of her passion sings from every stone. Bychkova, right, with one of her limited-edition costumed dolls, has said she fashions these works because “I want to create something, of such an outstanding quality, that will outlive me.” (She’s only 26, so this might take a while.) Her goal, she urges, is “to function not as a doll maker, but as a fine artist who is dealing with dolls as a medium for further dialogue, [and] not as the sole subject matter.”

In a frighteningly machine-made and -fashioned world, objects as thought-provoking and beautiful as, for example, Bychkova’s rapturous “Swan Princess,” right, with its night-blue lapis lazulis, are increasingly rare. Expect her work to rocket, not only in value, but in the rich pleasures it gives those whom collect it. Remember I said so first.

[via BoingBoing]