What are Breyer Halo Dapples?

This came up on a Facebook post I was on yesterday and so I thought it would be a good little topic to post an example of. You might have heard people mention Halo Dapples and wondered what exactly are they talking about. Breyer's resist dapple greys are famous and very popular among collectors and for a brief period of time in the early 1980s they had this peculiar halo effect.

You can see that each dapple has a "halo" or ring around it - sometimes it's a ring of other tiny dapples and sometimes it's just a lighter halo, but always this distinct circle within a circle. Breyer created their resist dapples by splattering on grease of some kind on the bare plastic, then painting the model, then washing off the grease to reveal the dappling. To me this looks like when you put oil in water and get that same sort of ring effect and so I wonder if during this time the models were still wet or had some other kind of treatment on them to cause the grease to form this halo effect when applied.

They are most famous for being prevalent on the black point proud arabians which is actually great because it helps us date this style of dapples to that 1983-84 period. But they weren't only on the proud arabians, you can also find them on other dapple greys of the time such as the Old Timer, Foundation Stallion, and Classic Andalusian Mare. They are less well known and fun to hunt for if you like to find unusual variations.

I have this Old Timer with halo dapples and you can see the difference versus another Old Timer from roughly the same early 1980s era. The halo dapples give him a sort of softer look compared to the stark edges of the regular resist dapples.

The other thing to know about these is the that paint finish is VERY fragile and easily rubs off. If you start looking for these you'll notice that it's very hard to find them without a lot of the paint rubbed off the higher areas from years of handling. This PAS who is on eBay right now is an extreme example of that, but you will typically see varying degrees of paint loss on these. I would posit that these two things are related and whatever they were doing to the blanks to cause the halo effect when painting also caused the paint not to adhere as well as it usually does.

So if you do find one of these be careful handling it and cleaning it if you want to preserve the paint work.