By Annie Holub
Arizona Daily Wildcat
October 9, 1997

Cloning Just in Time for the Holiday Rush

Arizona Daily Wildcat Small blonde girl enjoys a tea party with her equally small and blonde My Twinn doll.

Some junk mail cannot go unnoticed. Somehow or other, my mother got the weirdest catalog ever to enter a mailbox recently. It's from a company called My Twinn. What this company does is clone children.

All you have to do is send in a picture of your child, and for only $149.95, you can get a doll that will look exactly like the kid.

"We've worked with doctors, beauticians, hair stylists, anatomists, ophthalmologists, children's photographers, computer experts, master sculptors and artists," proclaims the company, "to design and produce the finest quality and most lifelike faces, eyes, hair textures and colors, skin tones and more."

On the order form are 24 different eye color choices, 15 hair color choices and 6 skin color choices. You can choose eyebrow color and shape, eyelash color, face shape (the photo is required for this one) and hairstyle. They provide drawings of faces so you can mark with a pen where your child has freckles, moles and/or birthmarks.

Having thus inspected your child as if he or she were a biological specimen ready to be tagged in the wilderness, you send off these stats and in three to six weeks, My Twinn has created a brand new plastic recreation of your son or daughter.

Yes, they have boy dolls, too. My Twinn wouldn't want to do anything un-PC.

"Many adults and teens have enjoyed a My Twinn doll made to resemble them at a younger age," the catalog says. So if you have a picture of your brother when he was 8, eating worms, you can order a doll, get some worms from the bait store and have yourself a very good and effective (and rather expensive) gag gift. Imagine his eyes when he opens a box to find a disgusting memory recreated for him!

My Twinn proudly declares that they do not mass-produce anything. The catalog has pictures of children holding these miniature versions of themselves, grinning and wearing matching clothes.

The matching clothing is, of course, also offered in the My Twinn catalog. Once little Ashley and her little Ashley doll are all decked out in the "Sunshine Bouquet" dress, can't you just hear Grandma Betty exclaiming, "I can't tell which one's the doll!"

Feedback from happy parents is printed in the corners of the pages, with photographs of their children clutching their clone dolls, saying things like, "When I gave them the dolls, they had tears in their eyes and said, 'Nana, do we get to keep them?'"

Some customers take a little longer to grasp the concept than others; T.S. of Liberal, Kan., exclaims (a bit reluctantly) "When my daughter holds her My Twinn doll beside her, the doll looks like her."

"We've made more dolls matched to children than anyone in the world," the company's website (www.mytwinn.com) states in bold type. "Our mission is to make children and families happy, one at a time, by creating the finest, most unique dolls in the world. We want to help kids and families feel good about themselves and appreciate how special and unique they are."

What a great way to strip your children of just a bit of that very uniqueness.

"We love kids," My Twinn adds, just in case you were wondering.