It's Sonny Angel's World, and We're Just Living in It
The tension at the Sonny Angel trade events Jackie Bonheim attended last year rivaled a championship poker match. Trades took place at bookstores around the country, including in Alpharetta, GA, and Boston. But Bonheim, director of marketing at Sonny Angel parent company Dreams USA, says that if anything — with all the wagering, breath-holding, and jumping for joy — she might as well have had front-row seats to a high-stakes card game in a smoky Vegas casino.
The attendees, of course, hadn't come to gamble on cards. They were there to trade three-inch plastic naked baby figurines donning tiny, elaborate hats on their heads and cherubic smirks on their faces. For many at these meet-ups, however, the trading was nothing to smirk at.
"It felt like throwing cards across the table, the overall intensity of it," Bonheim tells PS. As soon as offers got shot down, counter-offers would fly across the room. "People take it very seriously," she adds. "But in a fun way."
The Sonny Angel doll causing all this commotion has recently toddled its way into the mainstream, as a For You page mainstay and a collectors' item beloved by celebrities and influencers. It's also been the subject of a "Saturday Night Live" sketch — and probably the nightmares of countless retail workers who've had to contend with a global Sonny shortage due in part to the massive surge of enthusiasm surrounding the bare-tushed babes.
The dolls, which go for $10 a piece, only struck a cultural nerve in the US within the last couple years, but they've been around for 20 and maintained a steady fanbase in Japan, according to Bonheim. The company's CEO, Toru Soeya, was inspired in 2004 to create a real, pocket-size doll with a strong Kewpie Mayo baby likeness in an effort to spark joy in the hearts of Japan's young, professional women. Soeya, nicknamed Sonny, wanted the doll to "bring you happiness," according to the official website.
A lot of things can bring you happiness, though. A pumpkin spice latte. A colorful area rug. A hug from your mom. What differentiates Sonny Angels is that so many consumers find them completely irresistible — and though theories abound, no one has been able to pinpoint exactly why. Could it be the blind box packaging, which makes every unboxing experience an edge-of-your-seat surprise worthy of its own Reel? The absurdity of the exposed (and anatomically correct) genitalia paired with his various "headgear" in the shape of a strawberry or a frog? The simple fact that the doll, like all babies in hats, is just plain cute?
Sonny Angel enthusiast Aileigh Lenaghan estimates she has about 60 dolls in her arsenal. "Once you get one it's very difficult to stop. I've spent an unreasonable amount of money on them so far," she says. So what keeps her and other collectors coming back? "They're a little bit weird, which everyone really loves. The fact that they have these tiny, little penises, but they're also so cute. It just freaks people out but also interests people."
Whatever the reason, our collective obsession with miniature things long predates the Sonny Angel, though it has noticeably spiked at key moments throughout history. Curator Courtney Harris spent the last seven years working on "Tiny Treasures: The Magic of Miniatures," an exhibit at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts that displayed miniature decorative objects from around the world, like gold amulets from ancient Egypt and ivory carvings from Japan's Edo period.
In her research, Harris identified several eras during which miniature toys and tokens were especially popular, primarily across Europe (her region of focus). There was a big bump in small things during the Age of Exploration, when the world suddenly felt so vast that people lost their grip on reality. The invention of the microscope, which offered a window into the mind-meltingly tiny world of microbes, yielded an increased interest in miniatures throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Victorians, with their fairy obsessions, coveted especially small objects. And the era we're living through today — one of globalization, pandemics, smartphones, and isolation — is the latest in this line of spikes, helping to partially explain the Sonny Angel phenomenon.
"Coming out of the pandemic, people had more time but less space," Harris says. In COVID and post-COVID times, social media has been flooded with videos of people making tiny food, playing with tiny appliances, and animating tiny knitted critters. But dolls, Harris says, feel especially personal compared to other collectible play things and small objects because they can be manipulated and personalized. "You can't socialize a baseball card, but you can create stories, dramas, and dynamics with dolls."
If the millions of views on TikTok's Sonny Angel unboxing videos tell us anything, it's that there's a particular thrill embedded in the purchase. Their size makes them especially collectible, scratching the modern consumerist's itch to amass lots of things without taking up too much space or being burdensome. A collection of Sonny Angels is a relatively low-lift and renter-friendly investment for all those zillennials who aren't buying homes or having babies.
Aside from being little, however, today's mass-produced dolls share little in common with the popular miniatures of the past that were on display in the MFA exhibit — like intricate 16th century boxwood carvings from the Netherlands or a tiny diamond-encrusted bicycle brooch from the 1890s — which required meticulous craftsmanship, Harris says. Sonny Angels are designed in Japan, but manufactured from plastic molds in Chinese factories.
"They become more disposable or more able to be turned into waste because they don't have the craftsmanship, there's no known maker. You don't associate them having been made by anyone, or even made by hands," Harris says. "For a lot of history, miniatures were harder to make. Yes, they use fewer materials, but they often require a finer technique."
Today, the real Sonny Angel artistry is happening on the consumer end. One painter turned her Sonny Angel's headgear into a blueberry. Collectors like Janesia Fonville and Aya Brown also paint their Sonny Angels to achieve darker skin and detailed clothing items like itty floral shorts.
Lenaghan even makes her own dolls from scratch, using her boyfriend's 3D printer at their home in Edinburgh, Scotland. She designs the dolls herself, which each take about three hours to print. She calls them Mooli's Angels, after a nickname given to her by one of her sisters, and has made wedding cake toppers and a martian-green alien, among others.
"We've moved so far away from valuing handicraft that maybe the creative impetus comes from the person who owns it rather than the person who creates it," Harris posits. "No longer is the sort of 'maker of meaning' for these objects the person who created it, but the person who possesses it and does whatever they do with it."
In that way, Harris says, Sonny Angels are a sort of blank — ahem, nude — canvas onto which owners can project their own ideas, dramas, fantasies, skin tones, and, duh, favorite fruits.
Emma Glassman-Hughes is the associate editor at PS Balance. Before joining PS, her freelance and staff reporting roles spanned the lifestyle spectrum; she covered arts and culture for The Boston Globe, sex and relationships for Cosmopolitan, travel for Here Magazine, and food, climate, and agriculture for Ambrook Research.