General collecting culture questions

Oh, there is no on-topic here, ha! It was delightful to look through your photos!

Vinegar syndrome is a result of a batch of poorly mixed cellulose acetate in the 80's and 90s. It causes "shrinkies" at best, and complete breakdown into ooze at worst, so I hear. I have one shrinkie who is an absolute charmer and is just smaller and smells of vinegar. Hopefully no others are going through the same process while packed in boxes. I can't post links until tomorrow when my 7 day trial is up, but if you look up Breyer shrinkies, you'll find more information.

And here's my little guy, next to one of his big brothers:

Oh wow! Yes I hope that doesn't happen to your models! Thank you for the info though... your little one is still very cute.

Oh, just wait til you hear what happens to Julips in storage.
We refer to it as 'brie', because the latex can deteriorate into layers - a 'skin' which is slightly solid and dry to the touch like brie rind, over the top of sticky oozing beige stuff which will pour out of cracks and puddle.
A brie Julip is a terrible thing, if caught early it can be paused with superglue along the splits to seal the bad stuff inside, and given time some of them just re-set into a hardened version and have long happy lives in careful retirement (the trick is to make sure they're in a standing position, and not stuck down to their shelves, when that happens!). Others will just keep on seeping insides to the outside, and the only way to keep them at all is to encase them in a thin shell of milliput and repaint them.
Luckily, it only seems to affect models from the 1970s into the very early 80s - earlier ones tend to turn rock solid with no gooey stage, and later ones may crack but don't get sticky with it, so you just have to be gentle with them and they're fine.

Yikes, that's a pretty horrifying and graphic mental image, to be sure, and I don't even know what a Julips is!

It's a delight to find out, thirty and forty and fifty years down the line, what happens to various kinds of plastics. I know my little ponies also break down, in a totally different way than either of those. Delightful!  

This is a Julip, they're hand made one-of-a-kind toy/model horses from England. Cute and ridiculously addictive things

That is cute! What a horror it would be to find it dissolving.

As I said, luckily it seems to be only older ones who do it, and only some of those - having been stored in a loft for a long time seems to be a common factor, as collectors often buy from the first child owner who outgrew them, left them in storage, then rediscovered them years later and put them up for sale. Those who've belonged to collectors all along, and been looked after carefully under more normal conditions in bedrooms or display cabinets, don't seem to do it. Which is reassuring, we can invest in them and get attached to our herd, without worrying that one day the collection will end up as a big blob

I have another question to add to this list! Is "in package" collecting popular? Does "mint in package" increase the value significantly, or do most people prefer a loose model (or are most models loose to begin with)? I again have only two other collecting communities to compare to, and in one (My Little Pony), being in package still is a big selling point and worth quite a bit more, but most were sold on blister card - easier to display and store while in package than other brands. I don't see quite the same pull for Breyer, and in fact I see a lot of people prefer a model to be shipped out of box so it can be packaged more safely. I myself hate to buy older models in package because I like opening them, and I feel like I'm destroying something valuable if I do. (That didn't stop me from opening both Club Earth To Go packages I bought, though, ha!)

I almost always open the package, and my impression is that most animal and dinosaur collectors do the same. However, a significant number of pop culture collectors prefer to keep the packaging, and where those two things intersect I'd guess there's a lot of variation. Jurassic World collectors, for example, run the gamut, and it doesn't surprise me to learn that MLP collectors place a premium on packages. There's only been one figure I haven't opened, a rare dinosaur figure from the 90s that I got a few years ago. It felt wrong to open it after it had been in its package for 30 years.

I get the same impression as Tim, that most animal/dinosaur toy figure collectors aren't too into the packaging. Myself, I prefer out of package, and if offered a figure in/one without packaging, would choose the OOP. I'd feel sort of guilty opening an older box, or removing tags from an older figure, though I don't personally care about the packaging. But I also come from a collecting culture where people can be fanatical about original tags and packaging, and super mint condition.

I've heard of some figure collectors, when buying new figures, buy one to remove packaging/tags and one to keep with it. I suppose you could open them but retain the packaging in case of resale. If left in packaging, it might help for resale to mint fanatics.

As said above, it reallu varies person to person. Myself, I remove tags/packaging but if it is significant (old Safari tags for instance had little info blurbs on them or the breyer card things on the back of the box). For me it means nothing in terms of condition if it has tags, I have plenty of schleich with tags in not mint condition. I woukd rather the paint work look as good as possible than a 30 year old tag left on a leg (which can leave residue or even discolor where the tag is attached).

As it was said, if it preserves the original pakcage it is more valuable if you want to sell it later. It is transversal to almost all kind of collections. Packages are also part of this hobby, they provide us information and they are a little piece of history. As a collector, I don't care too much about them, as a TAW editor I find them interesting. @Jill, I think your Club Earth pacages are reusable, aren't they? I have a Schleich set in box and I can put everything inside and close it as it was never opened, isn't it the same?
Blisters are more difficult, some you have to destroy to remove the figure but a few you only need to slide the card from the blister and you can close them again.

I prefer figures in their original packaging, because, as Rogério says, they are part of the history of the figures. I have a few blister packs that I can't open without damaging them. Fortunately, I have the figures without pack too, so I don't have to open them.

My animals don't want to be chained, so I always remove the tags. Especially when they are sticker tags (like Schleich), I think it's important to remove them, because in the long term, the sticky residue may damage the plastic. I try to keep the tags, but it's difficult not to lose them.

Regarding the vinegar/acetate disease: I'd keep the infected figures well apart from your other figures. I don't know about Breyer, but it's thought that a similar disease in Clairet and Starlux is caused by a bacteria that can spread between figures when they come in contact with each other.

For Breyer Traditional models, I only keep the useful/interesting bits of the packaging - I cut out the feature which has a photo and information about the real horse or the breed from the back of the box, and keep them in a tray. I also cut out and keep the backing cardboard inside the box, if it's one which can be used as a photo background. The rest goes straight in the recycling bin, same with any packaging from Stablemates and Classics.
Most of the other brands I collect don't come with boxes at all, and I don't keep tags (I don't even read them : chances are if I've only just bought a model, I remember what it is, and the tag is just an extra thing to remove, a couple of seconds more effort in the unwrapping process!)

halichoeres wrote:

I almost always open the package, and my impression is that most animal and dinosaur collectors do the same. However, a significant number of pop culture collectors prefer to keep the packaging, and where those two things intersect I'd guess there's a lot of variation. Jurassic World collectors, for example, run the gamut, and it doesn't surprise me to learn that MLP collectors place a premium on packages. There's only been one figure I haven't opened, a rare dinosaur figure from the 90s that I got a few years ago. It felt wrong to open it after it had been in its package for 30 years.

That's an interesting observation. I wonder if it's something to do with those pop culture collectables being collectable partly because of the brand (a JP collector collects a Jurassic Park figure because it's a Jurassic Park figure, not just because it's a cool dinosaur) while a hobby like this forum is focused more on just the figure and not the brand. I know I got my set completionism tendencies, at least, from being a collector of a specific brand with specific sets.

Roger wrote:

@Jill, I think your Club Earth pacages are reusable, aren't they? I have a Schleich set in box and I can put everything inside and close it as it was never opened, isn't it the same?
Blisters are more difficult, some you have to destroy to remove the figure but a few you only need to slide the card from the blister and you can close them again.

Yes, I did keep my Club Earth cases and the packaging for the Extinct set as well as all the stuff inside of them. It's nice when it can be more easily preserved that way, but I also know there must be purists who wouldn't have cut that tape and taken them out at all, and would not consider that "mint in package." I do newly appreciate the importance of things still in their packages, trying to place and find these unmarked sets. These I hope to find in package, just like the horses, as confirmation.

rogerpgvg wrote:

I prefer figures in their original packaging, because, as Rogério says, they are part of the history of the figures. I have a few blister packs that I can't open without damaging them. Fortunately, I have the figures without pack too, so I don't have to open them.

The blister card dilemma is probably part of the reason brands like My Little Pony have so much love for the unopened card - because it's so hard to preserve them, and you can't open them without destroying them to a degree.

Quote :

Regarding the vinegar/acetate disease: I'd keep the infected figures well apart from your other figures. I don't know about Breyer, but it's thought that a similar disease in Clairet and Starlux is caused by a bacteria that can spread between figures when they come in contact with each other.

Thanks! Yeah, as far as I know with the Breyer, it's apparently only the break down of plastic and not caused by something that can spread. It was originally feared it was something like that bacteria, but "shrinkie" horses living on shelves and in storage with others have reportedly not affected the ones they are next to, even after years. Nevertheless, this guy is not super close to his shelf mates and he's kept out of storage altogether, just in case!