Skibidi. Mogging. Rizz. With so many new and strange words popping up, it’s almost relieving to be able to put a face to one of these names. Well, it would be, if the face wasn’t so damn ugly.
The swift rise of Labubu’s feels like the rise of NFT’s a few years back. Overhyped wasteful fun that quickly spawned a billion dollar industry, that will likely see an ever-swifter demise. It’s almost like we’ve gotten over seeing our landfills filled with booooooring old plastic bottles and straws, so we’ve collectively decided to spice up our towers of trash with these teethy terrors.
While the product itself launched back in 2015, it wasn’t until 2024 that the pie-faced pixies started to really take off in popularity throughout Asia after a BlackPink star was seen sporting one on her handbag, and quickly became a worldwide phenomenon, with no signs of slowing down. The reason for their popularity hardly even needs explanation, but for the sake of breaking it down:
How to make a global craze:
Ingredients:
1x Kpop superstar sporting a Labubu, with a huge presence on TikTok
Approximately 2 billion x TikTok Users
About 300 x different varieties of Labubu
Method:
Get yourself a sprinkling of Blackpink fans from your TikTok user supply. Just a few million will do the trick. Next, expose them to a picture of their idol sporting one of these Labubus. A good majority of these fans will naturally buy and post these Labubus. A few of them will need some special edition ones to flex on others though, so make sure the ones with a larger following get those ones! The rest of the recipe is self-working! The blind bag nature and exclusivity of these Labubus will ensure that they’ll spread across the rest of the TikTok population like grease on a brand new shirt. Then boom before you know it, you’ve got a brand new fresh global craze!
Perhaps I’m being too harsh. Maybe the Labubu’s aren’t the silly ugly things they seem. Maybe… It’s us? Those big greedy eyes and wide mouths are a mirror into our own collective consciousness, showing us that by idolising plastic and plush, we ourselves are becoming the silly little trinkets dangling from the swollen fingers of consumerism, thinking each of us is unique yet shaped by the same mould of materialism.
Actually scratch that. They’re simply just that damn ugly.
Brooke 
Hilda Hinton 
Holly Catsoulis