Switch me on, mommy

Some people get very attached to them, like its their own child, says Henning, a 31-year-old mother of three, adjusting Emilys magnetized pacifier. Ive had people say, Give her a snuggle for me when you ship her.

Highly realistic dolls like Emily have a quasi-sci-fi, quasi-evangelical moniker reborns. Popularised on the sprawling eBay auction site, reborning has become a cyber cottage industry pioneered mostly by stay-at-home moms who see it as an avenue for artistic expression and extra income.

Most reborn dolls start life as cheap vinyl babies made by a German company named Berenguer, some of which sell in the Kmart toy aisle for as little as 20. But at the hands of self-taught artists such as Henning, they are disassembled and rebuilt in a transformation worthy of Michael Jackson: Hair and eyelashes are re-rooted with mohair or, sometimes, real human hair.

Mouths and noses are spliced open, eyes replaced. Bodies are re-weighted to replicate the heft of a real baby. Faces and limbs are tinted inside and out, then painted in countless layers to simulate the blush-suffused, vein-traced translucence of newborn skin.

Then, the reassembled creation is given a name. The end result is a doll so realistic that some newborn artists receive indignant e-mails, admonishing them for selling live kids on eBay.

Nobody knows how reborning was born, says Dawn Marie Garma of Lupton, Michigan, who has been creating these lifelike dolls for two years. It has snowballed into a tight-knit international online community. Reborners congregate on Web sites like Garmas angelicreborns.com, where they trade ideas.

Preemies are extremely popular, Henning explains, nodding in the direction of Autumn, a red-haired preemie who recently sold on eBay for 305. Details count, right down to the magnetic umbilical cord that attaches to Autumns navel.

Henning bought the plastic umbilical clamp that caps it from an online midwife-supply company.

Arguably one of the best-known and most successful reborn artists in the country is a woman who will identify herself only as Kimberly Angel from Idaho. Selling under the eBay user name AngelStar Babies, Angel is a self-described perfectionist: Each of her babies has tens of thousands of micro-rooted hair follicles and a custom cloth body with silicone inserts to simulate baby fat, and is accompanied by a handmade quilt created by her seamstress-mother.Her creations can fetch in thousands, like Cassandra, who sold recently for a whopping 3,250. LAT-WP