22nd of August, 2026

Hello! You have stumbled across my first blog post. Today's topic is the story of my mouldy LPS collection (I know, it's horrific). A few months ago I checked the boxes which house my LPS collection as I hadn't look in them in a few months due to being bombarded with endless school work and assessments. To my dismay I discovered many of the LPS were MOULDY. I was shocked, I had always tried to store them carefully, placing padding in the bottom of their boxes, storing them in my dark (and hopefully cool) wardrobe. I was particularly dismayed by the fact that the box with the most mould was the cardboard gift box which I used to house my LPS cats and dogs (i.e. usually the most sought after and expensive group and also a favourite of mine). I had even put some of my favourite LPS from other groups like my postcard pet cow and my alligator in there too, thinking they would be extra safe.

After frantically stress-searching through the box I identified that most of the pets had tiny speckles of white mould on them. Just in little cracks and crevices but undoubtably present. Then I came across the worst offender. My brown boxer dog (#83 if you're curious). To be fair, he has had a rough past and to cut a long story short I picked him up one day and his head popped off. Luckily I was able to procure another LPS #83 off ebay (hopefully his wife didn't notice they swapped) and I of course keep the headless one because he is great for decapitation scenes in my videos.

Also, I know, I know, you don't need to tell me that it is easy to put the heads back on it you heat the pets up, but I was just so scared of destroying him. Plus, getting a new pet actually resulted in me getting more LPS because I bought him off ebay in this hair salon setup with two other pets that I really like!

Aaanyway, I got a bit off track again but it doesn't matter because there's no word limit on this thing. So, this LPS #84 dude was covered in white mould. The poor guy had it in his eyes, his ears, his mouth, it was everywhere! This makes me think that across his life his previous owner probably got him quite wet and he's been festering for years. Maybe that's why he had that spontaneous head-popping-off incident?

In any case, he appeared to be the epicentre of this mouldy outbreak as those pets nearest to him exhibited higher mould. I checked my other boxes too, including my metal collector's tin in which I store the other mammals, the purple plastic Sabrina's Secrets box which I got from my class teacher in year 3 which stores the sea creatures, insects and birds and the plastic collector's carry case where I store my actually expensive pets, the fuzzy pets and the children. Luckily the plastic collector's carry case had the least mould, but the other boxes seems to have a tiny bit.

I ended up just taking out the mouldy pets and lining the up on my bedroom floor to await being cleaned. And even though this was months ago they are still there. This mainly because I'm in my final year of school and I'm kind of busy getting annihilated by all the assessments (right now I really should be working on my major work which is due mid next week but I reeaaaaallly don't want to D:). I'll talk about the methods I worked out for cleaning the pets (which thank goodness have seemed successful so far) in the next post which is below. But for now I will discuss the theories I have developed as to why the pets became mouldy in the first place to hopefully help you (and I) work out how to prevent this in the future

My theories as to why the majority of my 330 Littlest Pet Shops got infected with white mould:

1. My cuboard's microclimate - you would expect one's wardrobe to be a 'cool, dark, place' like it says on all the food packaging and stuff, but maybe that isn't so. I have one of those big tall wardrobes across one side of my room with those big tall mirror sliding doors. I store my LPS collection inside here. I'm thinking maybe it gets really humid and warm in there, especially in the absolutely scorching Australian summers that can reach over 40 degrees celcius (104 degrees fahrenheit).
2. The positioning of my bedroom - this could contribute to a catastrophic cupboard microclimate because my room is kind of in a bad spot where it jutts out a bit and probably gets lashed by onecoming rain head one. My wooden windows have rotting problems and it generally feels kind of humid and damp and cold in my room, especially in winter. It doesn't seem to get a whole lot of sun either, especially in winter and so sometimes mould can be found on my bedroom wall (but only a little bit).
3. The LPS themselves - obviously that LPS boxer dog could have contributed to the outbreak, but it doesn't explain how it occured in all the other boxes. This makes me think that perhaps it is also caused by the LPS getting old. Perhaps their plastic is releasing residues which the mould can feed off. After all, the first LPS of the generation we love today were released as far back as 2004 for, making them over 20 years old! This theory could also be supported by the fact that nothing else in my wardrobe is mouldy. My giant LPS penguin, that wasn't even stored in my cupboard (it was on a shelf, which you would expect to have good airflow) had quite a lot of black mould on it. EW!
4. Maybe it could also be the fact that all of the LPS in my collection have come from a variety of sources, conditions, locations and have all been subject to different handling across their lifetimes. This could definately mean some been exposed to water, which could contribute to becmoing mouldy.

Overall it is just kind of a nightmare, and it is difficult to come up with preventative solutions when the problem could be the LPS themselves. I'm going to try storing them standing upright in big drawer trays of an organiesr or something so that the LPS will no longer be piled on top of one another. I still need to find an appropriate drawer thing to do this. I've already tossed the pesky cardboard box and I'll never store my LPS in those sorts of boxes again!

Thanks for reading this, I hope you enjoyed it or found it informative! Check my next posts to find out about how I've been cleaning the pets without removing their heads!

22nd of August, 2026

Hi again, I'm back! Today I'll be telling you how I have tried to solve the issue of the mouldy LPS by giving them a thourough clean. I deep a heap of research prior to starting because obviously I really don't want to damage my LPS. Many people online suggested submerging the LPS in a vinegar solution, but in my opinion that could cause water to become trapped inside their heads, causing neck peg rust and maybe even mould again. Other people suggested doing this and then using a bath of hot water or a hair drier to remove the LPS' heads and allow the water to drain out, dry them thouroughly and then heat them back up again and pop the heads on.

Obviously that didn't really appeal to me because a) popping off the heads of 330 of my precious and expensive Littlest Pet Shop collection is scary and b) because it'll take forever and I don't trust myself to be able to get them back on. Thus I decided that the best course of action was to clean them thouroughly externally and then leave them on a shelf to air for weeks to hopefully allow the dampness to leave.

Step 1 - I mixed up a vinegar solution of one parts white vinegar and one parts water. Vinegar kills the mould and so would hopefully prevent it from returning.

Step 2 - I then set down an old rag towel thing to protect the table and then I retrieve my first victim. The boxer dog. The mouldy culprit man. At first I tried scrubbing him with a finer rag dipped in the vinegar solution (being very carful to avoid wetting the neck plug area). It seemed to be working but after it looked like I had scrubbed all the mould off it all came back immediately! I was horrified.

Step 3 - Luckily I realised that scrubbing with a rag was just not strong enough to lift the mould. What I needed was a toothpick with a bit of tissue wrapped around its head so that the hard wooden part of the toothpick isn't directly scratching the pet, but the there is a concentrated point with which to scrap the mould with strength. I used this method to scrape all the mould off the pet, making sure to get all the cracks and crevices, even inside his nostrils!

Step 4 - Then I used a new electric toothbrush head dipped in the vinegar solution to scrub him all over with that (again being careful not to wet his neck plug). This hopefully would kill any remaining mould spores or roots that weren't removed by the initial scraping.

Step 5 - Then I used a different new electric toothbrush head (I had a bunch because my dad bought cheap ones a few months ago, didn't like them and then had a whole pack of them he did not use) dipped in fresh water to kind of rinse the pet, getting all the vinegar solution off. If you give the pet a good sniff you can sort of tell if you got all the vinegar off because as you might know, vinegar has a pungent smell. I know it seems sort of weird to be sitting their, sniffing your Littlest Pet Shops, but if it works it works I guess!

Step 6 - After that I used a clean rag to dry the pets thouroughly, again getting into all the cracks and crevices and taking special care to dry around the neck plug area.

Step 7 - Then I've just left them to dry out for weeks on an airy shelf in the living room. I could say I've done this deliberately but it is actually because I just don't have anything to put them back into after I threw out the cardboard box. I haven't yet been able to find a suitable drawer situation to store them in, but hopefully I will soon!

All in all, this process it quite time consuming! At most it takes me half an hour to clean one pet, but it can take as little as 10-15 minutes. I've probably cleaned less than 10 LPS of my collection of 330 due to being obliterated constantly by school. I hope that once I'm done with school I'll be able to focus on cleaning them all and then eventually work out a better way to store them all to try and prevent this into the future.

Rest assured that the white mould I experienced has not been eating the LPS' paint, even when the mould was on their eyes, so that was good. There was a purple cat LPS that the mould might have slighting damaged the paint on her tail, but it is hard to tell because I don't have clear old photos of her from that angle. On the whole, purple LPS seem to be more vulnerable to degradation over time as my long haired, persian cat (LPS #1771), which is one of my favourites has seen a lot of paint degradation. Her fur around her neck used to be a nice solid purple, but now the paint has separated with this kind of powdering pinkish look to it. It wasn't becaues of the mould (she wasn't really mouldy at all) but she was stored in that cardboard box which had the highest levels of mould.

This has made me think that perhaps the humidity caused this, but overall I'm really upset about it. I hope I can fix it, perhaps by repainting that part but I am not sure.

Additionally, in my research about the mouldy dilema I found a really interesting post which you can read here which someone made about the infamous 'pink mould' sometimes (incorrectly) known as 'Pony Cancer' because of it's simularity to the mould issues is prevalent in older generations of My Little Pony figures. It turns out that 'pink mould' is actually caused by a bacterium and that the hot pink marks that appear (and look uncanily like highligher) actually only show up after it is long dead. A few LPS in my collection, including Crazy Bunny (I have an old video on my channel about her) have these pink marks and considering Crazy Bunny's, let's say, difficult past it is not really suprising.

I've unknowingly stored Crazy Bunny in direct contact with other pets for years and the pink marks have not spread, which supports the claims of another person's post where they did an experiment on the pink marks. You can read about the outcome here.

Overall, I hope you have found this post helpful and informative and I wish you amazing luck if you are having similar issues with mouldy LPS!