It is much harder to make the face of a black doll than a white one. You encounter different kinds of challenges, which often need to be solved in more complicated ways or even have no adequate solution at all.
For example, for light-skinned dolls the eyes are done with a darker colored thread – black, brown or simply in colors like blue or green, or a combination of thereof. This is entirely enough to create a good contrast so that the eyes stand out. With black dolls, the eyes need to be black or dark brown, but since the dolls themselves already have dark skin the eyes end up not standing out at all. In order to solve this problem, I also insert some lighter thread in order to highlight the eyes' whites. That is easier said than done. One needs to pinpoint a good position and size for these kinds of details. The white thread needs to be sufficient to give a good contrast, but not excessive or it crosses the boundaries of good taste.
Another problem that you may encounter is when trying to apply makeup to a black doll. With white dolls, you bring liveliness to their face and have the ability to fill in details and enrich their facial expression by coloring lips, cheeks, the nose tip, chin... with black dolls, you do not have that ability. I tried giving makeup to black dolls, but whenever I did them with dark jersey like my customers sometimes ask for, I was never able to get a good result with makeup. Therefore, you have one less tool you can use.
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