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About a year ago, Crystal Kay, of Kansas City, Missouri, tackled her first major creative project: hand-making jewelry filled with Afro-centric imagery, meant to promote pride in African-American culture. Kay, who had been working as a hairstylist and nail artist for years, found that she'd been bitten by the crafting bug hard.

That's why she seized the opportunity to keep a couple of porcelain dolls her 10-year-old daughter intended to throw out and refurbish them, setting out with a similar mission to that of her jewelry line: promote diversity and body-positivity, by customizing the dolls with different skin tones, eye colors, hairstyles, and skin conditions like vitiligo or albinism.

Eight months later and Kay has customized over 100 different dolls, amassing over 4,000 followers on Instagram. "I'm still in shock. It's unbelievable," she said in a phone interview with Cosmopolitan.com. "I've had women in my inbox saying they are literally in tears because they have never seen anything like [my dolls]."

Kay said she was inspired to fill a void she felt existed among mass-manufactured dolls. "There's not a lot of reflection out there as far as various medical and skin conditions, and that's where the ideas came from for the vitiligo, albinism, and so on," she said. "The possibilities with these dolls are endless because there's so much diversity in the world."

Kay hand-makes nearly every aspect of the dolls, from their clothing, to hairstyles, to the repainting of their skin and face. Although the diverse hairstyles are often the most eye-catching part of the dolls, Kay said painting the doll's face can take up the most time. "I've made dolls in two to three hours, and I've made dolls that took two to three days," she said. "It's just depends on the extent of the details." Depending on those details, the dolls can cost anywhere between $30 to over $100. (Currently, her top grossing product is her customizable vitiligo dolls.)

Kay works both full time and part time to support a daughter with a disability — although she hasn't made enough to quit her day jobs, the dolls provide her with a small business hustle and a passion project. She gets requests for the dolls from her customers, but also comes up with her own creations. She doesn't use celebrities as her inspiration (with one notable, horrifying, exception below); instead, she looks at people in her life for ideas. "Everyday life inspires me — everyday living and realism," she said.

Check out some of her stunning, diverse doll creations below and on her website:

OK, and one that's flat-out terrifying:

Who asked for this doll!?!?!?

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Leanna Commins
I'm Lee, a news writer and a millennial who doesn't like avocado toast — but don't congratulate me yet, because I still spend half of my paycheck on regular toast. @ me. Seriously. I like new friends.