Anyone ever have a head go completely orange?

So, I started removing my DDH-06's faceup in prep for a new one and the further into it I got the more I noticed how... odd her vinyl was looking. At first I just thought "Wow! Was I really that off with the colour matching?" but the more I removed the more it became obvious that she had in fact, begun her transformation into an orange.

Before I did anything, I did actually notice that the colouring around her eye mods was more orange than everywhere else. I even took a pic 'cause I thought it was weird:

And here's what she looks like, halfway through cleaning her head:

 

Her eyebrows and eyelashes also performed a miracle and somehow managed to stain through the 10 or so layers of paint and probably another 10 layers of MSC...  I also coated an Obitsu head with the same paint and that head is doing fine, and both head got the 3 layers of MSC treatment before I started painting. The only thing I can think of is that maybe I didn't give the paint on this head enough time to fully dry before I started on her face proper and that affected something somehow??

It's honestly super funny seeing how orange she is compared to her bust piece, and luckily I'll just be re-covering her with acrylic paint so the staining isn't a big deal.

That said though, anyone have any ideas about how I might prevent this in the future? Or has this ever happened to anyone else? 

A thought: her head's painted all over, right? Is it possible that whatever iron-based pigments you used to make the fleshtone (a lot of reds and browns are iron) migrated from the first layer of paint into the vinyl?

Did you prime with acrylic gesso before painting? Gesso is traditionally used as an isolation coat to stop pigments transferring from the canvas/wood/other ground to the visible surface.

it's definitely the all-over layer of paint. This happened to me when testing paints on a junk head and it happened very quickly. 

1 hour ago, Chilmark said:

A thought: her head's painted all over, right? Is it possible that whatever iron-based pigments you used to make the fleshtone (a lot of reds and browns are iron) migrated from the first layer of paint into the vinyl?

Did you prime with acrylic gesso before painting? Gesso is traditionally used as an isolation coat to stop pigments transferring from the canvas/wood/other ground to the visible surface.

this is the paint i used: https://www.matisse.com.au/products/matisse-structure-formula/colours-sizes/unbleached-titanium-m7ut

it's not a perfect match for volks normal, but it's not that noticeable if I just blush the head more.

the bottom most layers of paint do actually look more grey than the top layers, so your theory might be pretty spot on. i didn't use any gesso, when i was doing research on colour matching dd's specifically i don't remember seeing anything about gesso so i wouldn't have thought to use it. i used this exact paint to fully cover my modded obitsu head at one point, and after wiping it's still the same whitey obitsu skin.

that said though, when i painted this ddh-06 head i put some of the paint in a jar with some flow-aid and i'm wondering if there was something in the jar that reacted weirdly with the paint because i'm checking that exact jar of paint now and it's definitely gone more red than the paint in the tube is.

39 minutes ago, Kotone said:

it's definitely the all-over layer of paint. This happened to me when testing paints on a junk head and it happened very quickly. 

this could also be true. the whole back of her head, which had much less paint on it than anywhere else, is the one part of it that didn't actually turn orange.

 

i've just put some tube paint and jar paint on her headcap in varying thicknesses as a test, i'll wipe it in a few weeks (if i remember lol) and see if either of them have stained.

Well, it's been a few weeks! Time to see how that headcap is doing.

The side of the head cap that I put the fresh from the tube paint on looked fine, same as the day I painted it. But this is what the jar paint side looked like:

You can see that some parts of the paint has begun to turn that same orange colour, and there's a faint ring around each bit of paint. The thicker paint parts are affected the worst. You can also see some staining on the edge of the headcap, but I think that's just from contact with the head, and not a part of this experiment.

Here's the entire headcap after I wiped the paint:

As you can see only the side that I put the jar paint on stained! Some stains are really faint, like the one on the very top right, where the paint was the thinnest. There's no (new) stains anywhere else on the head.

I can only guess that there was something left in the jar I put the paint in when I mixed it with the thinner, but what? The orange colour of the stains reminds me of henna, which could be possible since my mum dyes her hair with a henna + indigo combo. But would it really be in the tiny little jar I used??

I guess in the future I'll just get thinner paints instead of thinning them down myself? Hm....

Hmmm...  Since your fresh from the tube paint didn’t stain, it seems to me like one of two things could be the culprit.  One, if your mom had previously used your paint jar to mix her hair dye in, it could have left a residue even after being washed.  Or two, the paint thinner you used reacted badly with either the paint or the vinyl and caused the mixed paint to stain.
 

@hellFlower, I don't think it's something in the jar, I think it's the water liberating the iron pigment in the paint. In the fresh-from-the-tube paint, the iron (hydrated iron oxide is a fancy name for "rust") is all emulsified into the acrylic. When you dilute with water, the polymer of the doll vinyl is more molecularly attractive than the acrylic polymer in the paint.

This is so interesting (I miss organic chemistry lab LOL), I'm seriously tempted to get some unbleached titanium paint and do some experiments on the inside of a headcap where they won't show. I'd test my hypothesis by sticking a magnet over the patch of dry, water-thinned paint: I suspect it would yield an orange stain with a magnet-shaped stain-free patch in the middle.

@Chilmark Interesting indeed! I didn't actually add any water to the paint, just the flow-aid (you're supposed to, but well, I didn't lol) so I'm not entirely sure that what you said is exactly what happened here. The paint is water-based though, so I don't think you're wrong necessarily...

You're definitely right in that it isn't anything in the jar - I know because I have another orange victim, my DDH-10! I wiped her a few weeks ago and discovered that she had stained where I covered her mods too. I used the exact same paint (+white), exact same flow-aid, and likely the same brush. Because I only painted around her mouth, and not the whole head like my poor DDH-06 I was able to salvage her with some sanding and stain treatment. I didn't take a picture at the time, but luckily I haven't been able to finish her faceup so I was able to get a pic of the faint staining that remains:

It's fairly hard to see at this point, but there's definitely some stainage still going on there.

There's gotta be some sort of weird reaction between the paint, the flow-aid and the vinyl, since the paint on its own isn't leaving any stains. I've tried to do some research on surfactants and rust, surfactants on vinyl (I was finding the wrong kind of vinyl lmao), but I can't seem to find anything very relevant. Perhaps MSC has a role to play here too? I have noticed that it tends to bring out the red pigmentation in things...
I'm so desperate to know what exactly is going on here....