The craft of making reborn dolls was started in the United States in the 1990s. A reborn doll is a transformed vinyl play doll which looks exactly like a human child. The cost of one reborn doll runs into hundreds and thousands of dollars, depending upon the craftsmanship put into it. The reborner, as the reborn doll artist is known, takes days or even weeks to create a doll. The artist selects a suitable vinyl doll, gives several coatings of paint and adds new features to get the image of the desired child.

The people who collect reborn dolls can be classified into three main groups. One is those who collect them as regular dolls and in the second group are those who want to keep the image of a grown up child when it was small. A third group keeps a reborn doll in the image of a lost child. For the last two purposes the reborn dolls are created by the reborners as the exact reproduction of the real children. The parents of the lost child keep the doll as a solace for their grief. But some people differ and they say that it will only create psychological problems for the parents.

These reborn dolls are available online and, rarely, at some fares.