By Caitlin Doherty | June 2026
The Princess Phase
My daughter Niamh is four. She has been in what I can only describe as a committed princess phase for approximately eight months, which means that every story involves a princess, every drawing features a princess, and every morning begins with a negotiation about whether today is a princess dress day or a school day. (School days are, in her view, a significant inconvenience.)
She had been asking for a proper princess dress – not a onesie, not a fancy dress costume from a supermarket, but a real princess dress – for months. I had been putting it off partly because I was not sure what constituted a real princess dress in the mind of a four-year-old, and partly because I had bought cheap dress-up costumes before and watched them fall apart within a fortnight.
I wanted something that would last. Something with actual quality. Something that would survive the kind of daily, enthusiastic, full-commitment wearing that Niamh applies to anything she loves.
Why Melissa and Doug
Melissa and Doug is a brand I had trusted for years before this purchase – we have several of their wooden toys and craft sets, and the quality is consistently excellent. When I saw they made a princess costume set, I was immediately interested. A brand known for thoughtful, durable children's products making a dress-up costume felt like exactly the right combination.
The Melissa and Doug Princess Role Play Costume Set had everything I was looking for:
- Satiny dress with ruffles and regal details – the kind of dress that actually looks like a princess dress rather than a vague approximation of one; Niamh's verdict on first sight was an immediate and emphatic “it’s perfect”
- Complete 3-piece set – dress, silvery wand, and crown; everything needed for a complete princess experience without having to source accessories separately
- Machine washable – absolutely essential for something that was going to be worn daily by a four-year-old who approaches mealtimes with creative abandon
- Melissa and Doug quality – the brand's reputation for durability gave me confidence that this would last beyond the first week
I found it in the Costumes collection at ALTOE and ordered it as a surprise for Niamh's half-birthday, which is a tradition we have in our house for exactly this kind of occasion.
The Unwrapping: A Moment I Will Not Forget
Niamh opened it at breakfast. She looked at the dress for a long moment, then looked at me, then looked at the dress again. Then she said “Mummy, it’s a real one” in a voice that I found unexpectedly moving. She was dressed in it within four minutes, crown on, wand in hand, and spent the rest of the morning conducting what appeared to be a royal court in the living room, with her younger brother pressed into service as a knight and the cat as an unwilling dragon.
The dress is genuinely lovely. The satin has a proper sheen to it, the ruffles are well-constructed, and the regal details – the trim, the layering – give it a quality that cheap costumes simply do not have. The crown sits properly on her head rather than sliding around. The wand is the right weight for a four-year-old to wave with authority.
Four Months of Daily Wear
The costume has been worn, at a conservative estimate, on approximately eighty of the past one hundred and twenty days. It has been washed at least twenty times. The satin still has its sheen. The ruffles still hold their shape. The trim has not frayed. The crown has survived being sat on twice and dropped down the stairs once. The wand is intact.
Niamh's imaginative play has genuinely expanded since she got the costume. The dress-up element seems to give her permission to commit more fully to the scenarios she creates – the stories are longer, more elaborate, and involve more characters than they did before. Whether that is the costume or simply her development at this age, I cannot say with certainty, but the correlation is clear enough that I am inclined to give the dress some credit.
She still reaches for it first. Every morning, before school, she checks that it is where she left it. On weekends it goes on before breakfast. It is, without question, the most-used item we have bought her in the past year.
For Any Parent of a Child in a Princess Phase
Buy the good one. I know the cheap options are tempting – they are cheaper, they are everywhere, and a four-year-old does not necessarily know the difference. But a four-year-old who wears something every day for four months absolutely knows the difference between something that holds up and something that does not. The Melissa and Doug costume has held up. It will continue to hold up. And the look on Niamh's face when she said “it’s a real one” was worth every penny.
Shop the Melissa and Doug Princess Costume Set
Find the Melissa and Doug Princess Role Play Costume Set at ALTOE and browse our related collections:
Caitlin Doherty is a primary school teacher, amateur watercolourist, and mother of two based in Galway. She has strong opinions about children's toy quality, a high tolerance for imaginative play noise, and a cat who has reluctantly accepted his role as household dragon.
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