G1 pony hair: best hair of the 80s?

[LadyMoondancer]

It's natural for us to compare the hair quality of different pony generations, but does anyone else feel like G1 My Little Ponies (and other Hasbro toys, like Fairy Tails) had better hair than most 80s toys, too?  Like, Barbie starts out with nice hair, but after brushing it a few times it gets this frizzed, dirty look.  Strawberry Shortcake dolls have pretty colors in their hair, but not as a silky as pony hair.

The only hair I've personally seen that compared to pony hair was the hair of the Pixietails from Lady Lovely Locks.  But here's the weird thing--I've picked up the LLL dog secondhand a few times, and the dog's hair was lower quality than the Pixietails and did not style well.  Which was unfortunate, because the way they placed the hair plugs, the dog ends up having big bald spots on her coat.  (I've never had any other LLL toys so I can't compare the others.)

MLP hair had just the right heaviness, shininess, and "bounce".

[Al-1701]

Hasbro probably had a good supplier for whatever material they were using for the hair (was it nylon, because I think it was).  Really, Hasbro toys in the 80's just exude quality and durability.  Though, it was the decade where they really came into their own, and making good quality toys was a good avenue of market penetration.

[daisyd]

I saw somewhere, but can't remember where, that Hasbro used a supplier from somewhere in Italy for their hair. They were supposedly quite a small company so if that is true, they must have been pretty busy 

I think Hasbro must have switched supplier later on though, I find that the vast majority of later G1 ponies did not have quite such nice hair - it felt rougher and didn't look as shiny. My first few ponies, that I had from about age 6 or 7, and have been through quite a lot  still have fairly nice hair even after all those years. My later ponies have a tendency to look like they've been through several hedges backwards, even though by the time I got them, I wasn't really into playing with them any more, so they had less brushing and playing 'damage'.

[Featherwurm]

I think a big reason for the difference overall is MLP uses really a very nice quality of Nylon.  Barbie is generally saran - a fiber which looks more like human hair, but behaves very poorly under stress (personally, I don't care for the feel of it).  If I'm not mistaken it's also cheaper to produce than Nylon.  Monster high dolls are sometimes Nylon and sometimes Saran, this can be a problem as the saran is destroyed by acetone (nylon is not) and if you want to shrink their heads, you have to re-hair the saran haired ones completely first.  I think it's a point of production and a question of color for why the dolls vary.

Other fibers used for doll hair include Acetate, which feels nice, and quite like very clean human hair, but is very fragile.  Polypropylene, which styles like nylon but feels more like saran.  Kanekalon, which sucks on toast (for doll use!) unless it's a high quality wig grade, as it's really meant to mimic human hair.  There's also some novelty fibers out there, things that change colors or glow, and those of us that know our MLP know how much those vary in quality over time!

[dragonfly]

And I've noticed that some individual ponies are prone to good hair.
For example, I've never met a Gusty with bad hair.

[millenium0chi]

I agree that my ponies (to my memory, anyway) always had nicer hair than most of my other dolls.  Definitely better than my Barbies.  Actually, I would extend that to say that my Hasbro toys overall had nice hair.  I still have my Glitter N' Gold Jem from my childhood.  Even with the two-toned (blonde/pink) color and the gold tinsel, her hair is gorgeous.  Now, the disclaimer is that I took excellent care of her.  She's complete and her hair is still in the factory hairstyle, so I never undid the bows or brushed it at all.  But time and storage has not degraded the quality.  My current pony collection also has nice, silky soft hair.

Unfortunately, that quality doesn't seem to carry over to the currently produced toys.  Even some of the G3s that I used to collect had terrible hair straight out of the box.

[Taffeta]

The same is true of most of the Jem dolls, also Hasbro - except the Mexican ones are Juguetes Con Vida under license, I think, and they are not as good quality in terms of hair fibre so some of them end up pretty frizzy.

That said, the few SheRa figures I have are still not too bad after all this time. I don't know what was used for them...

Some of the G1 who lost their curls do end up with seriously horrible hair. Cherries Jubilee, I'm looking at you. And there's always the Sunshine Ponies and their streaks.

But I think G1 nylon is generally really nice