“Please, please, I want the rabbit or the sheep”, “anyone except the giraffe and the panda”… In recent weeks, TikTok has been filled with invocations for small surprise boxes with semi-naked baby dolls dressed only in tiny hats made of vegetables, fruits, animal heads or Christmas motifs. The Sonny Angels fever has landed in Spain with such force that it is not strange to see, if you look closely, people—mostly young people—on public transport, at school or in the library with one of these small dolls hooked to their necks. your cell phone, your keys or your laptop.
The Sonny Angels have become the latest trend that has divided the internet people among those who have become simple spectators and are not able to understand where these dolls came from; and those who have succumbed to the phenomenon—among whom are public figures like Rosalía—who have been waiting for weeks for the stockslooking for new stores where they are sold and accumulating boxes and boxes until finally finding the figurine they have been looking for for so long. But what exactly are these miniature baby dolls? And, above all, why has there been a collective madness around them?
The origin of the Sonny Angels
The Sonny Angels craze has reached Spain—and many other places in the West—from Japan. However, although we only met them here a few months ago, the truth is that the Sonny Angels have been triumphing on the Asian continent for twenty years, when the Japanese toy designer Toru Soeya created these small dolls inspired by others that date back to early 20th century: the Kewpie.
The Kewpies were the brainchild of American illustrator and comic book artist Rose O’Neill (1874-1944). These figures of naked babies made their first appearance in 1909, in the magazine Ladies’ Home Journalas comic book characters, and then became porcelain and vinyl dolls —in the Museum of Art Nouveau and Art Deco of Salamanca, in the Casa Lis, you can find an original from 1913— which quickly gained popularity around the world.
One of the people who was struck by the success of these dolls was the Japanese businessman Toichiro Nakashima during his stay in the United States, who took them as a reference to create his mayonnaise brand in 1925—which he also called Kewpie—and which used O’Neill’s naked boy design as its logo. In addition, it acquired the rights to distribute the American dolls in Japan. In this way, Kewpie mayonnaise Not only did it become the best-selling in the country, but the brand’s own identity became a true emblem.
Which brings us back to Toru Soeya, his Sonny Angels and the relevance that Japanese—and South Korean—culture is taking on in the West with the popularity of kawaiia Japanese adjective to refer to “pretty” and “cute,” which would include babies, animals, or, as in the case of the Sonny Angels, a fusion of both.
The tender and the pretty, that is, the ‘kawai’, is something that has traditionally been reserved (at least in the West) to the universe of femininity.
The success of the Sonny Angels in Spain
The collective craze for the Sonny Angels in our country came from the hand of Dan, a pop culture content creator known on TikTok as @lizziemcwhore, and whose house is full of figurines of these babies, as well as their versions. hippers (those that are placed on the computer and mobile phone), and other dolls with similar aesthetics, such as the Labubu (soft rabbits with angry faces) or the Sylvanian Families (velvet animals). Dan has been doing it for months unboxings of Sonny Angels boxes on his TikTok channel — with videos that can reach 700,000 views — and gradually the interest among his followers in these figures has been growing.
That’s what you notice Eva Fuentesowner of älva for kids —one of the toy stores that have been selling the original figures in Madrid for almost two years—, which assures that “Dan’s audience is the one that began to show interest in the Sonny Angels.” However, over the last year, and thanks to the level of virality that TikTok allows to achieve, the phenomenon has become truly crazy, and “the Sonnys that arrive sell out in hours. Since last summer we have received very few units—the lack of stocks It is widespread everywhere—and that is why the fakes have found a niche so easily. Sometimes it is difficult to find an authentic one for two or three weeks….”
The store itself has promoted a WhatsApp channel, which already reaches more than 1,000 followers, where it informs about the new packages that arrive, and where it encourages exchange between people who have received repeat ones. In this channel, of course, only authentic dolls are accepted – which nowadays cost around 20 or 25 euros, but can be sold for more money – instead of the fake copies that are sold in many bazaars or pages like Shein or Aliexpress for four or five euros. The establishment itself has created a TikTok video where it talks about the differences between real ones and fakes. Despite everything, the social network is full of videos—mostly of young women—opening their acquisitions, whether they are true or false, in front of the camera, and making viewers participate in the surprise.
This is, in fact, one of the great reasons for the success of the Sonny Angels: the excitement of knowing which one you are going to get. This is the case of María, 26 years old, who learned about the dolls eight years ago because her aunt gave one to her and another to her sister. At that time—when they were almost not distributed in Spain—María wanted to get another one, but she ended up ordering it from a French website that charged her very high shipping costs. And now, with social networks, that impulse to buy them has returned again: “We love that they are a surprise, the fact of opening it and seeing what it is. Plus, there are so many different series and collections that it’s like, God, which one am I going to get? All of that gives me a lot of adrenaline.”
Social networks have also generated momentum in people like Cris, 30, who records unboxings for her friends by opening them in the style of TikTok videos and “being silly”, although she recognizes that “with the stupidity, we have all ended up buying them.” Or the case of Myriam, 32 years old, who affirms that baby dolls do not attract her attention as much, but that she did like the ones they have launched in collaboration with the Mofusand brand—in the shape of a cat dressed up as other animals. —. Myriam says that she tried to find some in bazaars in Madrid, but they all looked very “fake”, so in the end she bought one online that she now has stuck to her laptop.
The aesthetics of the beautiful and the feminine
Based on the popularity of the dolls, a few days ago, Pepe Tesoro published an article in Substrate titled The Sonny Angels and the things I don’t understandwhere he recognized his position as a subject who spoke of the disdain typical of the figure of the “grumpy old man” who does not understand “these things about young people”, where he also pointed out – very correctly – that the rejection that this fashion produces was not only because of its linking to the youthfulbut also for acting as a paradigm of the feminine.
The “tender” and the “pretty”, that is, the kawaiiis something that has traditionally been reserved (at least in the West) to the universe of femininity. Therefore, any man, in a display of his masculinity, would not only have to flaunt incomprehension, but also mockery and ridicule. The Tesoro article also refers to all those “boyfriends and friends who laughed at the girls who carried them.” But why this rejection of tenderness as synonymous with beauty?
Faced with the impulsive purchasing that social networks have generated, Sabela, 43, has had Sonny Angels figures in her home for ten years. She has always been interested in the universe of dolls such as Blythe or Pullip, of Asian origin, and the Sylvanian Family, as a manifestation of beauty. He is especially captivated by the Sonny Angels’ aesthetic fusion between the human and the animal, “it’s not so much the fact that it’s a baby, but rather that idea of personified animals or animalized people.” Something that has not only led her to buy this type of figures, but to implement this aesthetic universe in the prints on her clothes or the tattoos on her body.
This dichotomy between embracing the beautiful—understood in terms of femininity—or rejecting it has been a constant within the feminist, queer, and Internet movements. Initially, the repudiation of the feminine, the pink, the infantile and “girl things” was understood as a way of approaching the universe of the dominant. “If you like pink or the figure of a baby dressed as a kitten” you cannot be taken seriously. However, little by little femininity was re-embraced not as something inherent to women, but as a space of creativity, beauty and art. And if that dominant authority discredited the feminineperhaps what should change was not the femininebut our own idea of authority.
The Sonny Angels are located in this universe—regardless of whether someone may like them more or less—and from there we must understand their rejection. However, we must not overlook other issues such as the fact that this praise of the “tender” and the “cute” (monkey) is capitalizing on our desires through compulsive buying; or this recent trend towards the exaltation of traditional values, such as what happened with the tradwives.
And it is striking that many of these unboxingswhich sometimes feature young people of 16 or 17 years of age (or younger ages), pose as another trend that is increasingly gaining strength on the Internet, that of gender reveal. “I am the mother… and I want the fawn to touch me” can sometimes be read as part of meme culture—especially when it comes from a generation that has fewer and fewer children—or as an echo of that time. in which girls played “moms and dads” or “families”, where the father’s character was played by another girl, or was absent altogether, since the boys were too busy playing soccer.
Internet fads—and the rejection of them—despite their ephemeral nature, are also impregnated with ideology. And it is always relevant to do a second and even third reading of something as “harmless” as a semi-naked doll, which at the same time is a brand of Japanese mayonnaise, and which is so angering some people both on and off the Internet.
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