Success: Removing Nose Scratches/Scuffs from AG Doll with Micro Mesh

Thanks to some suggestions on a doll forum, I decided to look into "Micro Mesh" --- an apparent restoration miracle tool when dealing with TLC American Girl dolls. Wow! I can't recommend this stuff enough, and here are some photos to show why.

We got a very TLC Just Like You #11 doll on eBay who needs a lot of work. A lot of the grime and dirt cleaned off easily with baking soda paste, and some other marks came off with Magic Eraser. Not bad. But her nose had a serious series of scratches and scrapes on her nose. It was really sad, because no matter how clean she got, she never looked fixed up. My guess is that she hit the pavement, and there were two scratches that almost looked like a cat claw or something sharp had gotten in there.

Someone on the forum had mentioned fixing a doll with similar problems, so (with nothing to lose) I decided that this might be a good time to try Micro Mesh. Mom found a good deal on Amazon for a pack that included nine different 3x4" pieces. Here's the link to what we bought:
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B000H6HIK2/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Everyone posting in the threads that I was reading instructed that you use the Micro Mesh dry when working with the dolls, so that's what I did. These pieces are quite large for such small work, so I plan on cutting them into strips of some kind. Be sure to mark the backs with the appropriate grade number, as it's hard to tell the difference between the coarse and fine on this.

Here is the doll when I started. You can see that her nose is pretty scratched. It was hard to photograph and doesn't quite look as bad in the picture as it did to the eye.

I started with the 1500 grade, which is the coarsest. You just need a small corner of the Micro Mesh, because you don't want to be unnecessarily sanding any area that you don't need to work on.

After about five minutes of sanding with the 1500, her nose looked like this:

You can see that the majority of the scuffs are gone, but the large slice and a smaller nick to the left of it are still there. These weren't actually gouges with a loss of vinyl. They really looked like scratches, leaving a little groove in her nose. They were trickier to get out, because I had to sand for a while to watch them fade away. I continued with the 1500 for about twenty minutes more --- time consuming, I know, but well worth it!

After the twenty minutes of sanding with the 1500, I then did about five minutes combined working up with the 1800, 2400, 3200, and finally finishing with the 3600. Here's what she looks like now:

There is no scratch or dent to see or feel. You can't even tell there was ever a mark on her nose! So, I would definitely recommend this Micro Mesh for serious scuffs and marks. I've already fixed another doll nose (not as scuffed as this one, though it was the kind that shows a white scrape on the end of the nose). We also have a Marie-Grace with a very small gouge out of her arm. It was rough around the edge. While the Micro Mesh cannot replace the missing vinyl to fill in the gouge, it did smooth it completely, so that you cannot feel anything rough or risk nicking it on something.

This is quite thrilling to fix TLC dolls like this, so I plan on doing a few more that we have sitting around. Hopefully, you'll be seeing more photos soon!