While my reasons of supporting LEGO have mostly vanished, I've been turning my attention towards the customs and bootleg market, especially the cheaper side. If you're willing to sacrifice a little bit of print quality and accuracy, you can basically get every character you've ever wanted for extremely reasonable prices nowadays. I'm seeing prices around $1 a fig which is great.
The only issue is most of the face prints are ugly as sin. They try too hard to make them accurate to the source material. The figs themselves are really good, but its just always the face! But even when they lean into LEGO's current style- I hate that look too! LEGO's modern style has always been an uncanny mix of adding too many details to what should be a simple face. Call me nostalgic but good design language thrives in simplicity.
I don't even mean stuff like the 90's era LEGO which experimented with a variety of face shapes in a cute set of styles, I just mean give me the literal smiley face! The most I'm willing to go is portraying mustaches or sunglasses. Defnitely no eyebrows or bangs.
The only issue is that LEGO released the standard grin in two other colors, light nougat and reddish brown. This was also a very limited release, with brown being only in 1 set and nougat in 12. All exclusive to Star Wars sets. This has made both heads rediculous to purchase in any reasonable quantity. You can get them relatively cheap one at a time, but even a modest 10-head order for either is setting you back $30-40.
If you're gonna ask 'why don't use yellow?', while its an iconic color for the brand, its not appropriate within context to use that. If we're talking something like classic Roblox, where anyone can pick any skin color they want for their character, its alright to have yellow as a default. LEGO however is not something people choose, its a representation of people. Minifigs represent real people and characters. I'm wanting to replace my Goku and Pucci faces, not ambiguous minifigs.
If I want a diverse LEGO city that still evokes those bright colors with generic non-character minifigs, it would need to be full of every color of the rainbow- including real skin tones! Having a sea of yellow only reinforces the harmful stereotype that yellow represents a sea of white people. I don't care what LEGO wants it to mean, that's what yellow skin has always been portrayed as.
Sadly even when LEGO has shortcomings- which are a lot, it isn't picked up by the community. Here are the two only other ways of getting fleshtone standard grins. Minifigs.me has them for $3 a pop with an exclusive medium-nougat color. This is some site that lets you make custom minifigs so the standard grin is just something you can apply- but oddly other faces come in brown and regular nougat? Even if you try doing the custom builder it won't let you pick it with those skin colors. They've got a pad printer set up for the smile- and yet won't even let me choose other colors like dark-brown, white, purple, whatever for a higher fee.
The other option is an AliExpress page selling bootlegs(?) of the minifigs.me options, where they just have a listing for 9 medium-nougat(?) heads for $5 plus shipping. This was my first time trying this site and my god is this awful, LEGO people actively use this place for alt-bricks? Its forced me into this setup where I have to pick one "free item" and one other item to check out, which I mean whatever shady tactics that's fine I'll grab some of the super saiyan hair or a any interesting parts to still come at to about the same price, but it doesn't even let you click on the 9 heads listing to look at details and other images? At no point in the process can I just look at the description and terms or conditions of the item, its just a price, an image, and the checkout. Ugh!
A place called ktownbricks does seem to have classic-style minifig heads which can be ordered sometimes in any color. Current selection seems super limited compared to their promo images, and still sadly no smiley! Oh well.
Updates
More smiley hunts. A place called bosskcustoms has a brown smiley for an unknown price, since the store is currently down and there's no archives of any of the pages. Ebay also has a selection of smileys printed on a few unusual colors, but $30 is a no go. Its not clear where they're getting it from either as there's nothing in the description.
I may have found a place that is doing all-color smileys! Coruscant Customs sold some on etsy in a lot, and generally has a decent selection of classic prints. They even have 90's style prints available in regular skintones which is exactly what I was wanting too! Sadly whatever stock is for the smileys its not on the page anymore, looks like it would've been $3 a head which is more reasonable I suppose for rarer colors. Technically if I buy the Star Wars Security Forces figure it comes in multiple flesh tones but that's $20 a figure. The hunt continues!
If a maker ever lets me buy a rainbow assortment of smileys for a reasonable price, lemme know on my guestbook!!! Same with any classic-style heads in non yellow. I'll be on that shit asap, I got way to many figs to smilify.
References
- Minifigs.me
- ktownbricks
- bosskcustoms
- Coruscant Customs Etsy
- Coruscant Customs
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