“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 half-naked dolls dressed only in tiny hats made of vegetables, fruits, animal heads or Christmas motifs. Sonny Angels fever has arrived 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 at the library with one of those little dolls hanging around their neck. . your cell phone, keys or laptop.
The Sonny Angels have become the latest trend to divide the world. Internet users among those who have become mere spectators and cannot understand where these dolls come from; and those who have succumbed to the phenomenon – among whom are public figures like Rosalía – who have been waiting for weeks for the actionslooking for new stores where they are sold and accumulating boxes and boxes until finally finding the figurine they had been looking for for so long. But what exactly are these miniature dolls? And above all, why was there a collective madness around them?
The origin of the Sonny Angels
The Sonny Angels craze reached Spain – and many other Western countries – from Japan. However, although we only met them here a few months ago, the truth is that the Sonny Angels have been triumphant on the Asian continent for twenty years, when the Japanese toy designer Toru Soeya created these little dolls inspired by others which date back to the beginning of the 20th century: the Kewpie.
The Kewpies are the fruit of the imagination of the American illustrator and comic strip artist Rose O’Neill (1874-1944). These figures of naked babies made their first appearance in 1909, in the magazine Ladies’ House Journalas comic book characters, then as porcelain and vinyl dolls – at the Museum of Art Nouveau and Art Deco in Salamanca, in Casa Lis, you can find an original from 1913 – which quickly gained popularity in the whole world.
One of the people struck by the success of these dolls was the Japanese businessman Toichiro Nakashima during his stay in the United States, who used them as a reference to create his brand of mayonnaise 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 American dolls in Japan. In this way, Kewpie mayonnaise not only became the best-selling mayonnaise 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 importance that Japanese – and South Korean – culture is taking on in the West with the popularity of kawaiia Japanese adjective for “pretty” and “cute”, which would include babies, animals or, as in the case of the Sonny Angels, a fusion of the two.
The tender and the pretty, that is to say the “kawai”, is something which is traditionally reserved (at least in the West) to the world 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 placed on the computer and cell phone), and other dolls with a similar aesthetic, such as Labubu (soft rabbits with angry faces) or Sylvanian Families (velvet animals). Dan has been doing it for months unboxings of Sonny Angels boxes on his TikTok channel — with videos reaching 700,000 views — and little by little the interest of his followers in these figures grew.
This is what Eva Fuentes, owner of älva for kids, notes. —one of the toy stores that have been selling the original figurines in Madrid for almost two years—, who assures that “Dan’s audience is the one who started to be interested in the Sonny Angels”. However, over the last year, and thanks to the level of virality that TikTok allows you to achieve, the phenomenon has become truly crazy, and “the Sonnys that arrive sell out in a few hours. Since last summer, we have received very few units—the lack of actions It’s widespread everywhere – and that’s why fakes have found their way so easily. It is sometimes difficult to find an authentic one before two or three weeks…”
The store itself has promoted a WhatsApp channel, which already reaches more than 1,000 subscribers, where it informs about new packages that arrive and where it encourages exchange between people who have received repeat ones. In this chain, of course, only authentic dolls are accepted – which today cost around 20 or 25 euros, but can be sold for more money – instead of the fake copies sold in many bazaars or on pages like Shein or Aliexpress for four or five euros. The establishment itself created a TikTok video in which he talks about the differences between real and fake ones. Despite everything, the social network is full of videos – mostly of young women – revealing their acquisitions, whether real or fake, in front of the camera, and allowing viewers to participate in the surprise.
That’s actually one of the big reasons for the success of Sonny Angels: the excitement of knowing which one you’re going to get. This is the case of María, 26, who discovered 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 buy another one, but she ended up ordering it from a French site that charged her very high shipping costs. And now, with social media, that impulse to buy them has returned: “We like them to be a surprise, to open it and see what it is. Plus, there are so many different series and collections that I wonder, “My God, which one will I get?” All this gives me a lot of adrenaline.
Social media has also given momentum to people like Cris, 30, who records unboxings for her friends by opening them in the style of TikTok videos and “being stupid”, although she admits that “with stupidity, we all ended up buying them”. Or the case of Myriam, 32, who says that dolls don’t attract her attention as much, but that she liked the ones they launched in collaboration with the Mofusand brand – in the shape of a cat disguised as another. animals -. Myriam says she tried to find some in the bazaars of Madrid, but they all looked very “fake”, so she ended up buying one online and has now stuck it on her laptop.
The aesthetics of beauty and femininity
Given the popularity of the dolls, Pepe Tesoro published an article a few days ago in Subtrato entitled The Sonny Angels and the things I don’t understandwhere he recognized his subject position which spoke of the typical disdain of the figure of the “grumpy old man” who does not understand “these things about young people”, where he also pointed out – very rightly – that the rejection that this fashion produces is not only due to its link with the youngbut also to act as a paradigm of the feminine.
The “tender” and the “pretty”, that is to say the kawaiiis something that has traditionally been reserved (at least in the West) for the world of femininity. Therefore, any man, in displaying his masculinity, should not only display incomprehension, but also mockery and ridicule. Tesoro’s article also refers to all those “boyfriends and friends who made fun of the girls who wore them.” But why this rejection of tenderness as a synonym for beauty?
Faced with impulsive purchases generated by social networks, Sabela, 43, has had Sonny Angels figurines in her home for ten years. She has always been interested in the world of dolls like Blythe or Pullip, of Asian origin, and in the Sylvanian Family, as a manifestation of beauty. He is particularly captivated by the Sonny Angels’ aesthetic fusion of human and animal, “it’s not so much the fact that it’s a baby, but more this idea of personified animals or animalized people.” Something that led her not only to buy this type of figurines, but to implement this aesthetic universe in the prints on her clothes or the tattoos on her body.
This dichotomy between embracing beauty – understood in terms of femininity – or rejecting it has been a constant within the feminist, queer and Internet movements. Initially, the rejection of the feminine, the pink, the infantile and “girl things” was understood as a way of approaching the world of the dominant. “If you like pink or the silhouette of a baby dressed as a kitten,” you can’t be taken seriously. However, little by little, femininity was reassumed not as something inherent to women, but as a space of creativity, beauty and art. What if this dominant authority discredited the femininemaybe what should change wasn’t the femininebut our own idea of authority.
The Sonny Angels are in this universe – it doesn’t matter if anyone likes them more or less – and it is from there that we must understand their rejection. But we must not neglect other questions such as the fact that this praise of “tender” and “cute” (the monkey) capitalizes on our desires through compulsive purchases; or this recent trend towards the exaltation of traditional values, like what happened with the traders.
And it is striking that many of them unboxingswhich sometimes feature young people aged 16 or 17 (or younger), present themselves as another trend which is gaining strength more and more on the Internet, that of gender reveal. “I’m the mother…and I want the fawn to touch me” can sometimes be read as part of meme culture – especially when coming from a generation that has fewer and fewer children – or as a echo of that time when girls were girls. they played “moms and dads” or “families”, where the father character was played by another girl, or was absent altogether, because the boys were too busy playing football.
Internet fads—and their rejection—despite their ephemeral nature, are also steeped in ideology. And it is always relevant to do a second, or even a third reading of something as “harmless” as a half-naked doll, which is at the same time a brand of Japanese mayonnaise, and which arouses so much anger among some , on and off. Internet.
