Why are adult women obsessed with Labubu dolls – and should I be, too?

When 26-year-old healthcare consultant Michelle Keller peeled open the shiny packaging to reveal a chestnut furry gremlin baby staring back at her, she squealed. She had completed the mission. After hours of elbowing her way through central London crowds last month to find a Labubu, a wildly popular keyring doll originating from Hong Kong, she had successfully located the highly coveted “rare special” Labubu. In addition to its brown fuzzy coat, it comes with freckles, a red nose, rabbit-like ears, and spiky, menacing gnashers (imagine a crossover between a creature from Where the Wild Things Are and an evil Teletubby). Keller had, essentially, won the collectable toy lottery.

There’s no denying she worked hard to get there. Tension filled the air inside the Soho store belonging to Chinese retailer Pop Mart when the staff emerged with fresh Labubus from the stockroom. “Everyone rushed over and grabbed multiple boxes. I was like, ‘I didn’t know that today I had to fight... I was not mentally prepared for this,’” Keller laughs. “I just made sure the child in front of me had secured one, and then I was like, ‘Grab two, grab two!’” She proudly wears the dolls attached to her handbag, and takes it everywhere she goes.

Keller is just one of the thousands of young women dedicating their weekends to Labubu hunts, posting aesthetically pleasing pictures of the toys on Instagram and accessorising their bags with these creepy-looking six-inch-tall figures. The dolls, belonging to a tribe called The Monsters, created by Hong Kong illustrator Kasing Lung, are the latest in a long line of collectable characters from Asia, including Hello Kitty, Sonny Angel and Monchichi, that have driven the internet into a frenzy.

This week, Pop Mart, which exclusively sells Labubus globally, announced it has temporarily stopped selling the toys in its physical UK stores for the “safety and comfort of everyone” after tales of retail bedlam. Customers have been camping outside the stores from dawn, and there have been reports of violence as hungry resellers continue to sweep aisles for Labubus to flog at an inflated price (they typically start at £17.50, but some of the rarest are available to buy online for £1,500).

The craze is in part down to the fact that they are sold in “blind boxes”, which means people will keep on buying the dolls until they find their desired one. While researching this piece, I hear from Labubu connoisseurs that people are stealing rare dolls affixed to people’s bags. “Leave your Labubus at home!” reads a post from a distressed Reddit user. Keller tells me she has also stopped wearing the “rare special” doll outside, and is instead drafting in her two less valuable Labubus.

While the UK is arguably late to the trend, since Labubu was launched in 2019, sporting one of these goblins has become the latest status symbol for young women. Just like owning a Stanley cup in every colour was the ultimate flex last year, trotting around with a tiny monster attached to your bag signals to your peers that you are culturally aware (well, according to your Instagram algorithm), you are on-trend, and, crucially, you’re part of something.

Really, it’s about following a blueprint for a carefully curated aesthetic that’s come to typify young women’s consumeristic tendencies, where our entire existences seem to revolve around trinkets and tiny characters. (I would know, since I’m writing this with a Kawaii Kuties cat plushie resting on my desk.) The trend may feel superficial on the surface, but beneath the TikTok videos and the fisticuffs happening in Pop Mart, many of the women partaking in the trend are doing it to find connection with others.

And it appears no woman is immune to the pull of the Labubu, which has many celebrity endorsements. There’s Rihanna, who was spotted adorning her Louis Vuitton bag with a lychee berry Labubu, and Dua Lipa, who clipped her grey and white Labubu duo to her Hermès Birkin bag while on a trip in Japan, and K-Pop star Lisa Manobal from Blackpink, who posts Labubu hauls online and refers to her growing collection as her “babies”.

It’s no surprise, then, that the toys-for-adults market is worth £1bn in the UK, while £1 of every £3 currently spent on toys is spent by a “kidult” – an adult consumer interested in entertainment aimed at children – according to toy industry analyst company Circana. Luxury fashion houses have been embracing the wearable plushie trend, too: Miu Miu featured bag charms in its spring/summer 2024 collection; Danish brand (di)vision sent a plushie-covered coat down the Copenhagen Fashion Week runway last summer; and practically every luxury fashion house is trying to keep up with the trend by selling miniature accessories for clients to display on their bags at a lower price point.

The popularity of these dolls has emerged at a time when accessorising your outfit with personal trinkets and keychains is increasingly en vogue, with all roads leading back to Jane Birkin’s legacy of decorating her well-loved Hermès bag with Save Tibet posters, prayer beads, and even nail clippers in the Eighties. But what’s most interesting about the current trend is that wealthy people are adorning their £15,000 Birkin bags with a snaggly-toothed elf creature that costs less than £20.

Amanda Marcuson, founder and creative director of the vintage bag charms and keychain company Bag Crap, whose clients include Lily Allen and Tracee Ellis Ross, says that women are increasingly looking to customise their belongings in a unique way that will encapsulate and convey their personality. The artist, who is a longtime charm collector, started accessorising her secondhand Birkin bag because she felt it was “too stuffy”. If anything, though, she’s more passionate about her charms than she is about the bag itself.

“I remember some guy was making fun of me for wearing a Kermit the Frog on my bag, but I was like, ‘You don't even know what you’re talking about. This is like a limited edition Kermit the Frog!’” she laughs. Marcuson says that wearing a cheeky character on a luxury bag essentially disarms people. “When I see someone walk into a room with a Birkin, ‘I’m like, oh, shoot,’ but then if you see they have a Labubu on it, then it’s like, ‘OK, I guess this person knows how to invest in bags and is a silly person.’ It changes the perception of things.”

Since starting her company last year, Marcuson has seen how an entire community is being built around the accessorisation of bags – with its membersbonding over the characters and symbols they wear in the process.

“Adding silly charms to your bag is a great way for you to showcase what your interests are without having to tell someone,” she says. “It’s about finding commonalities with other people over bag charms, and that’s something that people are really hungry for right now. If you’re bonding over a character, like a Labubu, it opens the door for easy conversation and connection. Right now, people are looking for opportunities to feel joy and not take things too seriously. It’s liberating to allow yourself to not take things too seriously all the time.”

Keller says that she often has interactions with people who enquire about her rare doll, and finds they can get into deep conversations about different toys, like Smiski and Sonny Angel. “It’s such a great connection point,” she says. “Sometimes I’ll see someone with one on their bag, and I’ll know that they had to go to Japan to get that. It’s a nice sneak peek into someone’s personality.”

It’s not just young women enjoying the trend, either. Michele Sobel, a luxury goods artist and founder of Michele Sobel’s Fine Art, who paints on designer handbags for clients, has had requests from clients of all ages who are keen to get involved with the trend. One client commissioned Sobel to paint a picture of their most beloved stuffed toy on their £2,000 Goyard tote bag, for example. “My client has a huge collection of Jellycat bunnies and attaches them to her Goyard bag. We painted three of the bunnies on her Goyard, and she adds key chains and accessories, too.”

When Sobel shared a picture of another client wearing one of her commissions – a Louis Vuitton bag she’d customised with a Labubu (a fuzzy white one holding a miniature Diet Coke can) – she realised the attraction of the dolls. “I have a number of clients of different ages who all say they’re adding Labubus to their bags,” she says. “It’s just really caught on.”

What makes Labubus different from other popular collectables, though, is that they are... well... a little bit scary – unlike Jellycats or Squishmallows, which are currently having their own craze among adults but are equally enjoyed by children. In fact, I’d wager that any newborn sighting a Labubu would probably let out a fearsome wail. But Joshua Dale, a professor of “cute studies” at Chuo University in Tokyo, Japan, and the author ofIrresistible: How Cuteness Wired Our Brains and Conquered the World, tells me that as cute culture has grown bigger, people are looking for different forms of cuteness outside of conventional Hello Kitty plushies or cat-shaped keyrings.

“The popularity with non-cute characters, like the sharp teeth and red eyes of Labubus, is that people get jaded with sweet cuteness all the time and want something different,” he says. “Labubus are a bit more interesting because they give off a sense that they’re thinking something, maybe even they want to attack you, but it’s in a similar way to how you would think that about a puppy or a kitten.”

Dale believes that the reason Labubus and other Asian dolls are so popular right now is because cute items are “happiness generators” for adults and have a “self-healing” effect. “When people have cute little things, it makes them feel good. You know, we’re all really stressed right now in today’s world, so to have something with you that calms you down is powerful.”

Where Dale lives in Japan, he’s noticed a huge uptick in men, particularly businessmen, wearing small cute items like plushies, keychains or phone cases. “I think it’s a way of expressing yourself that is relatively mild compared to other forms of self-expression, like wearing a football shirt. In Japan, people can do it without other people criticising them, because it’s normalised now.”

The picture isn’t quite the same in the UK, yet. While Labubus are acceptable among a large community of young women here, Keller says people often raise their eyebrows at her furry friends as she commutes around London with them. “People definitely comment that they are creepy or weird, but I just tell them, ‘It’ll grow on you,’ and it usually does.” Keller has just started a new job and held off wearing her doll during her first week as a precaution. But she’s readying herself to debut her Labubu in the office next week.

“I was planning on waiting until the third week, but I’ve already told my colleagues about my Labubu and said I’ll bring it in on Tuesday,” she says. “You just have to test the water sometimes.”