Make-up Preserving Blythe Sanding

I decided to try, with my surprise girl Ethel, if it would be possible to sand the shiny face of a Blythe, but preserve the original make-up. Turned out, it is possible!! This might be good news to people, who would like to keep the original face paint, but don't like the shine, or those who are not skilled or interested in doing face-ups themselves.

Here’s how I did it:

I cut a small thumb sized square out of my 3M Microfine sanding sponge. I figured it would need to be the microfine type in order to not end up with loads of sanding dust and so that the finish would be as natural as possible. I did not take her face plate off, but she was all whole with eyes and everything when I was working on her.
I started around the sides of her face and her forehead and scrubbed with circular movements until I thought she’d be photographable without much shine reflecting. I turned her around under my lamp to see where there were still shiny spots.
I folded the sponge and sanded the nose and nostrils. This took s bit longer as I had to be careful not to accidentally swipe across the painted areas.
Then I started sanding over the painted areas, beginning with the eye shadow. The paint does rub off slightly, so the touch needs to be very light and gentle. I managed really well with the eye shadow: very little of it came off, but the shine was gone. The paint transfers to the sanding sponge, so now that I was ready to move on to the blush section, I changed the sponge, so that none of the blue eye shadow would end up on her cheeks.
With the blush, I was a bit less successful. My hand slipped and the sponge took off more of the colour than I had wanted, which left a paler patch on her right cheek. I had to sand a bit more vigorously all over, which then resulted in the colour being less potent than it originally was, but I did manage to get it even then eventually, with a slight hue of pink left on her cheeks.
I also sanded over the lips super lightly. I thought it would not matter in the least if the lips had a gloss on them as such, but in order to get all the shine out from around her mouth, I did a slight sweep over the entire lip section then.

Here’s how Ethel looks now after the light sanding over her make-up, less radiant, but matte:

This is only a temporary quick fix for my Ethel. She will get a full makeover eventually. I just wanted to photograph her already, but I really don’t know how to work with the shine. I have no idea how some people do so well with the shiny faces and get their girls looking so lovely in photos. That wasn’t happening for me, so I had to come up with an alternative solution. I’m rather pleased with this experiment with Ethel though and should I at some point find a girl who’s look I want to preserve, yet get rid of the shine, I have a way to do it now! Yay!!!

Here’s Ethel in her photos now. I did solo shoot with her first...