Black female minifigures?

[Natant16]

I'm trying to buy some black female minifig heads for customs, but none seem to be available on B&P, and I can't find any on bricklink that aren't comically overpriced. Anyone know of good places to get these parts?

[1974]

Standard unprinted head, torso, legs and pigtails in black are rather cheap. Please define "black" ..

[timemail]

If you are after fleshie heads rather than yellow they are generally going to be more expensive as they are all licensed (as far as I know).

You can search on Brickset by part (link below) and filter by colour - you could search for female but male (or alien) faces may be suitable so you may not want to limit. It gives an approximate price and link through to Bricklink (I don't know of a way to search minifig heads by colour on Bricklink).  Some are cheaper but depending on your use they may not be suitable.

https://brickset.com/parts/category-Figure-Heads-And-Masks

Given fleshie heads are licensed you generally can only buy them in sets or on the resale market as Lego don't normally sell licensed parts.

Occasionally you can get bulk lots of heads on ebay which may be useful but I wouldn't think a single head. Sometimes you may be better off just ordering a whole minifigure if you find the head you want and hope the rest will be suitable for another project.

Not a lot of help since my answer is basically you just have to pay the resale price.

Edited May 23, 2021 by timemail

[williejm]

Depends what kind of colour you’re looking for, as there are three used as flesh tone for people of colour in Lego. They are rare, and females especially so - but worth checking out some of this licensed themes like Harry Potter and Jurassic World, as well as Superheroes. 

[zoth33]

The black panther sets have some like Shuri.  Harry potter I believe have some too.  If you don't want to buy the minifig pieces off bricklink then you'll probably have to buy the sets.  B@P usually don't have licensed heads on there but sometimes they do show up.  All the parts your looking for will be licensed so they will be harder to come by.  

[williejm]

4 minutes ago, zoth33 said:

The black panther sets have some like Shuri.  Harry potter I believe have some too.  If you don't want to buy the minifig pieces off bricklink then you'll probably have to buy the sets.  B@P usually don't have licensed heads on there but sometimes they do show up.  All the parts your looking for will be licensed so they will be harder to come by.  

Yep. You might wanna check eBay too 

[Clone OPatra]

This is the list on Bricklink of reddish brown Minifigure heads with female printing - type "female" into the Find field (it's not copying for some reason).

https://www.bricklink.com/catalogList.asp?pg=1&catXrefLevel=0&colorPart=88&catType=P&catID=238&v=1

But like you've ready discovered from the sounds of it, they are all pretty pricey because they're still quite few and far between, and thus desirable to lots of people!

[Karalora]

As a workaround, you can try using a "male" head with no facial hair printing and rely on the hairstyle to code the minifig as feminine.

[Alexandrina]

10 hours ago, Karalora said:

As a workaround, you can try using a "male" head with no facial hair printing and rely on the hairstyle to code the minifig as feminine.

This might be the (janky) best way of doing it - and not entirely without precedent either. I know as recently as the mid-90s Paradisa sets (possibly more recently - I don't profess to have an encyclopedic knowledge of Lego minifigures) there was a print with no overt gender coding used frequently for female minifigures. (This one). The selfsame print was used for male-coded figures too.

Without knowing too much about the options - I wonder if something like 3636cpb1429, with the right hair/torso combo, might do the job?

[Peppermint_M]

Uh. The Mid 90s is not recent... We are in 2021. 1995 was twenty-six years ago, that's over a quarter of a century. (Gosh. Makes me feel old!)

But I digress. 

The recent Fairground people pack had generic yellow figures with hairstyles favoured/coded/natural to black people. However, for actual skin tones, you are stuck with hard to find licensed ones 

[Lira_Bricks]

Aren't there any 3th party heads compatible with lego? I have no idea, never looked into that...

[Natant16]

On 5/23/2021 at 3:18 AM, timemail said:

If you are after fleshie heads rather than yellow they are generally going to be more expensive as they are all licensed (as far as I know).

You can search on Brickset by part (link below) and filter by colour - you could search for female but male (or alien) faces may be suitable so you may not want to limit. It gives an approximate price and link through to Bricklink (I don't know of a way to search minifig heads by colour on Bricklink).  Some are cheaper but depending on your use they may not be suitable.

https://brickset.com/parts/category-Figure-Heads-And-Masks

Given fleshie heads are licensed you generally can only buy them in sets or on the resale market as Lego don't normally sell licensed parts.

Occasionally you can get bulk lots of heads on ebay which may be useful but I wouldn't think a single head. Sometimes you may be better off just ordering a whole minifigure if you find the head you want and hope the rest will be suitable for another project.

Not a lot of help since my answer is basically you just have to pay the resale price.

Ok, thanks.

[Blondie-Wan]

On 5/23/2021 at 1:56 AM, Natant16 said:

I'm trying to buy some black female minifig heads for customs, but none seem to be available on B&P, and I can't find any on bricklink that aren't comically overpriced. Anyone know of good places to get these parts?

If you’re doing non-purist customs, you might be better off getting unprinted brown minifigure heads and then adding custom faces.

[Legochaek]

Try the build a minifigure tower? 

[NathanR]

On 5/23/2021 at 6:56 AM, Natant16 said:

I'm trying to buy some black female minifig heads for customs, but none seem to be available on B&P, and I can't find any on bricklink that aren't comically overpriced. Anyone know of good places to get these parts?

Unfortunately, Lego only uses flesh tones on licensed minifigures. That means they will never be sold on B&P or appear in the build-a-minifig stands at Lego stores. The only way to get them is by buying the sets they appear in, or paying the inflated prices of bricklink or brickowl.

A non-purist solution is to get genuine Lego heads printed with custom expressions - this UK store does top-notch work and I can highly recommend them: https://minifigs.me/collections/dark-skin-tone-heads

[Natant16]

12 hours ago, NathanR said:

Unfortunately, Lego only uses flesh tones on licensed minifigures. That means they will never be sold on B&P or appear in the build-a-minifig stands at Lego stores. The only way to get them is by buying the sets they appear in, or paying the inflated prices of bricklink or brickowl.

A non-purist solution is to get genuine Lego heads printed with custom expressions - this UK store does top-notch work and I can highly recommend them: https://minifigs.me/collections/dark-skin-tone-heads

Yeah, I think I'll be using them, I've ordered a few custom figs, and they've turned out great so far.

[williejm]

16 hours ago, Lego-fire said:

Try the build a minifigure tower? 

Nah, you won’t find them there 

[zoth33]

On 5/24/2021 at 3:24 PM, NathanR said:

Unfortunately, Lego only uses flesh tones on licensed minifigures. That means they will never be sold on B&P or appear in the build-a-minifig stands at Lego stores. The only way to get them is by buying the sets they appear in, or paying the inflated prices of bricklink or brickowl.

A non-purist solution is to get genuine Lego heads printed with custom expressions - this UK store does top-notch work and I can highly recommend them: https://minifigs.me/collections/dark-skin-tone-heads

I wouldn't say never some star wars and I think harry potter heads have shown up at times.  

[Kit Figsto]

Historically I believe it used to be quite common for licensed stuff to show up at Build a Minifig in brand stores, but this was back when stores were much, much less common.  I truly think Build a Minifig used to just be "Here's a bunch of random extra minifig parts we have laying around, let's send them to stores" because there wasn't really any consistency between stores, and I found some very, very interesting stuff in them. 

I know that back in the day, I made two figures that had springy legs from the NBA sets, one with a torso and head from the NBA sets (not the licensed ones, just the street basketball ones, so it wasn't flesh tone), and a yellow Jabba's Palace Leia body and legs (also, a Dr. Killroy head, but that wasn't licensed).  A few odd things here, this was circa 2006, I want to say, which was at least 3-4 years after these figures had come out in sets.  Perhaps even stranger, at the time, I had no idea what parts went together with what, I was literally just making random figures and happened to put together some of the NBA parts and, perhaps even more amazingly, happened to put together the Leia torso and legs.  

Anyway, I digress, but I don't know if I've seen licensed stuff in Build a Minifigure since that time.

Edited June 6, 2021 by Kit Figsto