Why People Collect Sonny Angels? Psychology Explained

The tension at the Sonny Angel trading events Jackie Bonheim attended last year rivaled a championship poker match, with deals taking place in bookstores across the country, including Alpharetta, GA, and Boston. But Bonheim, the chief marketing officer for Sonny Angel’s parent company, Dreams USA, says that if anything — with all the betting, holding your breath, and jumping for joy — she might as well have been sitting in the front row of a high-stakes card game in a smoky Vegas casino.

The participants, of course, weren’t there to play cards. They were there to trade three-inch plastic figurines of naked children, wearing tiny, fancy hats and cherubic smiles. But for many of the participants in these meetings, trading was nothing to laugh at.

“It was like throwing cards on the table, the overall intensity of it,” Bonheim tells PS. As soon as offers were rejected, counteroffers flew across the room. “People take it very seriously,” he adds. “But in a funny way.”

The Sonny Angel doll that caused all this fuss recently burst into the mainstream as the star attraction of the For You website and a collectible beloved by celebrities and influencers. It was also the subject of a sketch on “Saturday Night Live” — and likely the nightmare of countless retail workers who have had to deal with a global Sonny shortage, in part because of the huge surge in enthusiasm surrounding these naked babes.

The dolls, which cost $10 each, have only recently entered the U.S. cultural mainstream in the past few years, but have been around for 20 years and have a solid following in Japan, according to Bonheim. The company’s CEO, Toru Soeya, was inspired in 2004 to create a real-life, pocket-sized doll with a strong resemblance to the Kewpie Mayo Baby to bring joy to young, professional women in Japan. Soeya, nicknamed Sonny, wanted the doll to “bring you happiness,” according to the official website.

Many things can bring you happiness. A pumpkin spice coffee. A colorful rug. A hug from mom. What sets Sonny Angels apart is the fact that so many consumers find them utterly irresistible—and while theories abound, no one has been able to pinpoint exactly why. Could it be the packaging in the invisible box that makes each unboxing a suspenseful surprise worthy of its own Reel? The absurdity of exposed (and anatomically correct) genitalia paired with a variety of strawberry- or frog-shaped “headgear”? The simple fact that the doll, like all children in hats, is just plain cute?

Sonny Angel fan Aileigh Lenaghan estimates she has about 60 dolls in her arsenal. “Once you get one, it’s really hard to stop. I’ve spent a lot of money on them,” she says. So what keeps her and other collectors coming back? “They’re a bit weird, which everyone really loves. The fact that they have these tiny penises, but they’re also so cute. It just freaks people out, but it also interests them.”

Whatever the reason, our collective obsession with miniature things predates Sonny Angel, though it has grown noticeably at key moments in history. Curator Courtney Harris spent the past seven years working on “Tiny Treasures: The Magic of Miniatures,” an exhibition at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts that showcases miniature decorative objects from around the world, including gold amulets from ancient Egypt and ivory carvings from Edo period Japan.

In her research, Harris identified several eras in which miniature toys and tokens were particularly popular, mostly in Europe (her region of focus). The Age of Discovery saw a big surge in interest in small things, when the world suddenly seemed so vast that people lost touch with reality. The invention of the microscope, which offered a window into the mind-bogglingly small world of microbes, fueled a surge in interest in miniatures in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Victorians, with their obsession with fairies, coveted particularly small objects. And the era we live in today—an era of globalization, pandemics, smartphones, and isolation—is the latest in this series of surges, helping to partially explain the Sonny Angel phenomenon.

“Coming out of the pandemic, people had more time, but less space,” Harris says. In the COVID era and after, social media has been flooded with videos of people making tiny food, playing with tiny appliances and animating tiny knitted creatures. But dolls, Harris says, feel especially personal compared to other collectible toys and small objects because they can be manipulated and personalized. “You can’t socialize a baseball card, but you can create stories and drama and dynamics with dolls.”

If the millions of views on Sonny Angel’s unboxing videos on TikTok tell us anything, it’s that there’s a certain thrill involved in buying them. Their size makes them particularly collectible, satisfying modern consumerism’s desire to amass a ton of things without taking up too much space or being intrusive. The Sonny Angels Collection is a relatively cheap and renter-friendly investment for all those Zillennials who aren’t buying homes or having kids.

But aside from being small, today’s mass-produced dolls have little in common with the popular miniatures of the past that have been on display at the MFA—such as intricate 16th-century boxwood carvings from the Netherlands or a tiny diamond-studded bicycle brooch from the 1890s—which required meticulous craftsmanship, Harris says. The Sonny Angels are designed in Japan but manufactured from plastic molds in factories in China.

“They’re becoming more disposable or more recyclable because there’s no craftsmanship, no known maker. You don’t associate them with being made by anyone, or even by hand,” Harris says. “For most of history, miniatures were harder to make. Yes, they use fewer materials, but they often require more sophisticated techniques.”

Today, the real Sonny Angel art is happening on the consumer side. One painter has re-imagined the Sonny Angel headpiece as a berry. Collectors like Janesia Fonville and Aya Brown are also painting their Sonny Angels to have darker skin and detailed wardrobe elements like 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, and each one takes about three hours to print. She calls them Mooli’s Angels, after a nickname one of her sisters gave her, and has made wedding cake toppers and a green, Mars-colored alien, among other things.

“We’ve moved so far away from appreciating handmade things that maybe the creative impulse comes from the person who owns them, not the person who makes them,” Harris posits. “The creator of meaning for these things is no longer the person who made them, but the person who owns them and does what they want with them.”

In this way, Harris says, Sonny Angels are a kind of blank — um, bare — canvas onto which owners can project their own ideas, dramas, fantasies, skin tones, and, of course, favorite fruits.

Emma Glassman-Hughes is deputy editor at PS Balance. Prior to joining PS, her roles as a freelance and staff reporter spanned the lifestyle spectrum, covering arts and culture for The Boston Globe, sex and relationships for Cosmopolitan, travel for Here Magazine, and food, climate, and agriculture for Ambrook Research.