The word alone is enough to make some people break out in a cold sweat, and it’s hard to blame them. These fuzzy, diminutive creatures, complete with a stare some have described as demonic, became truly inescapable over this past summer. Everywhere I turned, from the airport to the mall to the bathroom at my below-minimum-wage job, Labubus followed, staring at me ominously from backpacks and keychains.
Labubus began innocently enough, originating in 2015 from a picture book series by Kasing Lung before they were made into toys. However, after slowly gaining traction throughout 2024 and early 2025, Labubus exploded in popularity over the summer, flying off store shelves around the world. Resale prices skyrocketed as demand rose and they became harder to come across, to the point where some people instead opted to knowingly shell out money to buy fake Labubus, affectionately referred to as “Lafufus.”
This traction, however, was short-lived. While in the summer you might have had to spend $200 on a Labubu if you could get your hands on one, today I scroll my feed and find microinfluencers promoting genuine Labubus for $30 on TikTok Shop. They’re just not hard to find anymore. Combined with the fact that the stock price of Pop Mart — the company behind Labubus — is down nearly 35% (at the time of writing) since its peak in August 2025, it’s clear that Labubus are on the downswing.
Of course, Labubus are not alone in this fall from grace; fads have always come and gone. However, for as prominent as Labubus became, they seem to have faded from popular culture abnormally fast — even for a fad. Although it might seem anomalous, a clear pattern emerges when analyzing Labubus and the other massive trends that have appeared out of nowhere as of late.
In an era when people are more connected with each other via the internet and social media, trends can gain greater prevalence than ever, faster than ever. Simultaneously, in the era when most internet users consume more short-form content than anything else, our attention spans are shorter than ever, causing these trends to seemingly drop off the face of the Earth once people get bored of them.
Because of this, the internet has become a tapestry of many different digital phenomena, all so massive that they define the culture while they’re around, only to evacuate our minds as quickly as they appeared when it’s time to make room for the next trend. There’s no longer one single, massive cultural moment that sticks around for years in the vein of “Gangnam Style” or slime or fidget spinners. Instead, trends from various corners of the internet coalesce into one, and we get a mush of whatever “Labubu Dubai chocolate ‘Love Island’ matcha Benson Boone moonbeam ice cream cookie” is supposed to be. It’s a complete mess.
And yet, as cringeworthy as the modern internet may be, it will never go back to the way it was before. The reality is that the internet has become decentralized; rather than people staying in one gigantic, unified group with shared trends and moments like they used to, users go their separate ways, with social media algorithms providing hyper-curated content that pushes users toward smaller groups with niche shared interests. It is from all of these individual, smaller communities that the many different trends we see today seem to merge into one.
But maybe this — the mess, the chaos, the mishmash — is a unifying cultural moment after all, just in a new form. The beauty of the internet has always been that people from so many different places and backgrounds are able to come together and interact with one another, so it only makes sense that our trends would follow the same pattern. Looking back on the big trends of the past, I’ve realized it’s unrealistic for everyone to come together and enjoy the same thing, especially when we constantly preach individualism and influencers push us to be ourselves. For the most part, the internet trends of before were not truly unifying; they were just bandwagons we all hopped onto for fear of missing out.
But now, in this new wave of internet trends, nobody has to miss out. We are free to enjoy what we want to enjoy while experiencing the trends and culture from sides of the internet we might have never ventured into otherwise. It’s not everyone being the same that brings us together, but rather the exchange of culture, information, interests and everything in-between that is facilitated by the internet. Labubus themselves are an example of this — despite initially only being prominent in China (where Pop Mart is headquartered), small interactions between internet users from there and the rest of the world allowed the culture barrier between them to be breached, eventually making Labubus a global phenomenon, even if only for a little while.
The decentralization of the internet and its trends has allowed the web to become a more unified, multicultural place — and it’s beautiful. Even if it’s a jumble, I will gladly take all of the “Labubu Dubai chocolate ‘Love Island’ matcha Benson Boone moonbeam ice cream cookie” summers that the internet has to offer.
Daily Arts Contributor Caiden O’Donnell can be reached at [email protected].