Over the past year, Sonny Angel — a biblically inaccurate, 3-inch-tall cherub figurine with peculiar headgear — has taken over the hearts, minds, phones, display shelves, and nightstands of collectors across the world. The plastic dolls, wearing helmets ranging in form from pancakes to sunflowers, are garnering millions of views on TikTok and Instagram, popping up in supermodel Bella Hadid’s social media posts and on Victoria Beckham’s phone, and the subject of an entire sketch on Saturday Night Live.
Like any phenomenon where someone is buying tons of a thing that you may not be, the obvious question arises: Why is everyone so obsessed with these tiny winged boys?
The simplest answer is the official Sonny Angel slogan: “He may bring you happiness.”
That’s a tantalizing promise. Money can’t buy you happiness, allegedly. But it can buy you a Sonny Angel. At the retail price of $10 per doll, that’s a deal many have already taken, some collectors dozens of times over.
A more fascinating answer is that maybe Sonny Angels, like anything people love, give us a better understanding of what happiness is. What if you could find it in a tiny doll who wears a cute hat?
What are Sonny Angels?
Despite that, canonically, they are toddlers, Sonny Angels are 20 years old, created in 2004 by a manufacturer named Toru “Sonny” Soeya. Soeya was inspired by the cuteness of the Kewpie mayo baby and his creations share many of their predecessor’s traits — in particular, their amiable roundness. They also have similar circular eyes, always looking up and to the side instead of straight on, like they’re either slightly embarrassed or flattered.
According to Dreams, the Sonny Angel distribution company in the US, Soeya made these dolls to assuage the stresses of young working women in Japan. Around the time of Sonny Angels’ creation, Japan was going through a mild recession and would get hit hard again four years later in 2008.
“He referred to them as a ‘pocket boyfriend’ which I think may have gotten lost in translation a little bit,” Jackie Bonheim, the director of marketing at Dreams, the US Sonny Angel distributor, tells me. Bonheim explains that the Sonny Angel appeal is platonic, silly comfort — rather than a supportive romantic boyfriend, they’re more like an adorable baby you don’t have to care for. That cuteness is central to their appeal.
Joshua Paul Dale is a professor at Chuo University in Tokyo and the author of Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired Our Brains and Conquered the World in 2023, about how kawaii culture and aesthetic went mainstream. He explains that time and time again, research has shown that humans respond to creatures with baby-like features — round eyes, big foreheads, teeny tiny short limbs, globular cheeks. The term is called baby schema or kindchenschema, which both Kewpies and Sonnys embody.
When those features appear in human babies, or puppies, or even juvenile octopi, they trigger a primal, evolutionary response that makes us want to protect that cute thing, likely too young and weak to care for itself. Sonny Angels, with their positively absurd forehead to eyeball ratio and stout limbs, trigger that same instinct.
This protective instinct is made stress-free by design touches that signal Sonny Angels’ (slight) autonomy. They stand straight up on their own. They all have headgear, which they seem to have figured out how to put on themselves. A Sonny Angel can seemingly take care of himself, and more importantly, can make you feel better. Like a tiny friend would.
Sonny Angels may bring you happiness
Bowen Yang doesn’t talk about Sonny Angels; he gushes. “You can’t help but smile when you look at one,” the actor, comedian, and Saturday Night Live writer and cast member tells me. On the slogan — “He may bring you happiness” — Yang says, “there’s no ‘may’ involved. It’s an assured thing that a Sonny Angel will make you feel happy.”
Yang, who co-wrote a sweet and slightly sinister, Challengers-themed sketch wherein Dua Lipa turns her boyfriends into Sonnys with fellow writer/Sonny aficionado Celeste Yim, explains that he stumbled upon the dolls in 2018. It was Yang’s first month or so at SNL, and he says that he’d walk around Bryant Park to clear his head whenever he needed a break. One day he dipped into Kinokuniya, a small Japanese gift store, and found a Sonny Angel display toward the back of the shop.
“I bought one on a cosmic whim and have been collecting them ever since,” he tells me, noting that his collection is now around 30, scattered around his apartment, writing office, and dressing room. “My first Sonny Angel ever was Apple.”
What Yang refers to as Apple is a doll from the Sonny Angel Fruit Series who wears red apple-themed headgear with a little leaf coming out of it. All Sonny Angels wear some kind of accessory on their heads; maybe a hat, maybe a helmet, maybe both. (One thing is for sure: They’re decorations, and not natural head growths, as the official website makes clear.) These cranial ornamentations range from sea creatures like manta rays to alliums like onions and garlic to pets like French bulldogs and Shiba Inus.
These helmets differentiate each Sonny Angel, but raise a plethora of questions.
Are Sonny Angels one guy trying on multiple pieces of thematic headgear based on his mood? Or are they different-but-identical-looking guys who have chosen specific helmets that reflect their personalities? What compels a little human to put an onion on his head? Is it a fashion statement or does he really like onions? More than that: Are Sonny Angels wearing these curious crowns because they like them or are they wearing them to make us feel better? And why don’t they have pants?
This is the aspect of Sonny Angels’s allure that’s difficult to capture — the imagination that these little dolls spur in a person. Each Sonny’s uniqueness ignites storytelling, a narrative we create to reconcile our feelings with the weird cuteness at hand: where it came from, what spurred it.
Yang tells me about his favorite Sonny Angel: Snake, who has an albino serpent coiled on his head like a turban. “He knows he’s different, and he’s not afraid to be,” Yang tells me. “A diva. He’s not like the other girls. And that’s what we should all aspire to.”
For some of their biggest fans, Sonny Angels represent a curiosity and an appreciation for the world around us, and are themselves a reminder that there’s wonder in self expression.
The craze over Sonny Angels, explained
After their cuteness and ability to inspire, the most important thing to understand about Sonny Angels is that you never know which one you’re going to get.
Sonny Angels are part of a bigger toy collector trend known as “blind boxes.” Each doll is individually sealed and packaged, and while buyers can choose a series — e.g., Fruits, Vegetables, Marine, etc. — they can’t choose a specific Sonny to buy in-store. Barring X-ray glasses or some clever shaking (some buyers believe you tell which Sonnys are by what they weigh and how much they vibrate) there is no guaranteeing what Sonny you’ll get. It’s like opening a pack of trading cards.
Dreams also shuffles rare Sonny Angels, known as “secrets,” into the fold as well as special figurines called Robbys. Robby Angel, according to Sonny lore, is Sonny’s “close friend,” but it’s hard to tell whether Robbys are dogs or mice. I asked Dreams’s Bonheim, and she simply responded, “Robbys are animals,” providing no further clarification.
According to Bonheim and Dreams, there’s a 1 in 144 chance of pulling a secret or a Robby from a regular Sonny Angel series.
This makes buying Sonny Angels feel a bit like gambling. There’s an incentive to buy more than one box to raise your chances of getting the Sonny you want. At roughly $10 a pop, they’re priced low enough that just one more might not break the bank, even if the odds aren’t in your favor.
This randomness — and the addictive dopamine rush of opening a Sonny Angel — is tailor-made for TikTok and Instagram. The drama, suspense, reveal, joy, and even disappointment in any Sonny Angel unboxing increases the potential for virality. According to Bonheim, Sonny Angels’ popularity on these platforms has driven real-life sales.
Bonheim did not specify the exact figures Dreams was making, but did say that sales “spiked” over the past three years with 2023 and 2024 being the strongest in the US. Store owners I spoke to were more specific, having witnessed the boom first hand.
Why I wrote this
I will always remember the first Sonny Angel I ever saw: Shark from the Marine Series. It was November 2023 and I was at a friend’s house, and on his coffee table, staring right back at me, was this little boy figurine with a sea animal hat on his head. His adorable, round little face was right in the great white’s jaws. I was mostly enamored, a bit mystified, and a little creeped out by that little baby. Later that week, I found myself wanting one of these little weirdos in my own home.
That was much easier said than done. Everywhere I looked, they were sold out. Apparently you can find everything in New York City — except for Sonny Angels. When I finally procured a Sonny Angel, I decided he needed a friend (or two). Again, easier said than done.
The Sonny Angel shortage, outsize demand, and my need to know exactly why I had to have this little guy in my life sent me on a hunt for Sonny Angels and spurred this piece.
That, and my editor spotted my collection in the background of our Google Meet and kept asking me if it had grown. (It had.)
“Obviously it’s TikTok,” says Annie Chung, the co-owner of An.mé, a New York toy store and authorized Sonny Angel retailer. “If you look back on the videos we have on social media, you can see the growth.”
Chung has been collecting Sonny Angels since 2004, and selling them since 2014. It wasn’t till post-pandemic lockdowns, around 2021, that she noticed the sales begin to build. At the same time, encouraged by shoppers, An.mé began hosting Sonny Angel meetups and trading events and posting on social media.
“By the third event, all the spots were booked within 30 minutes and over 50 people showed up,” Chung tells me. Chung’s meetups grew each time, eventually moving out of the tight stores, and one 2023 Washington Square Park meet-up brought in over 500 people. “The park ranger thought they were gonna do bad things. But they were all here for Sonny Angels,” Chung says.
Today, Chung says she sells between 500 to 1,000 Sonny Angels per week, depending on her inventory. When there’s a new release, the line can snake around the block, with fans lining up hours in advance. Chung’s biggest sellers are “Hippers,” Sonny Angels that you can attach to your phone or any object edge (laptops, iPads, Tesla navigation consoles, etc.)
Kimberly Bach, co-owner of Clubhouse Kid & Craft, a toy store and art space in Decatur, Georgia, saw a similar rise in popularity at the end of 2021 and into 2022. Then in 2023 came the moment that she knew changed everything. “The series that started it all was the Cat Life series,” Bach tells me, laughing, of the series that featured the Sonny Angel dude in several cat costumes — Calico, Silver Tabby, Tuxedo, Siamese, et al. — doing “regular” cat things like drinking from a bottle of milk. “It was just like, all of a sudden, it was just a flood of people either coming into the store or buying them online.” Her stock of 140 Sonny Angels sold out in four days.
Bach tells me that she sells roughly 12 Sonny Angels per day, an extremely successful figure given the size and location of her store. She has a set of regular customers near Auburn, Alabama, who drive almost three hours to her store weekly, along with many other customers without a local Sonny Angel retailer. “If they don’t have one where they live, they come to us,” she says.
As Bach and Chung note, shopkeepers can’t keep Sonny Angels on their shelves. If they have them in stock, they’re selling them. But their inventories aren’t always stocked, and scarcity makes the demand even stronger.
“I would say it’s an unintentional part of the appeal; it’s not something we’re doing on purpose,” Bonheim, the Dreams marketing director, tells me.
Bonheim explains that a rigid production schedule and a desire to maintain the quality of their figurines means that Dreams makes and distributes a finite amount of Sonny Angels. The company also, intentionally, refrains from selling at big toy retailers, opting instead for smaller specialty toy stores and independent bookstores — a strategy they see as maintaining the spirit of the Sonny Angel as a collectible.
Add in to that the roughly two-year design process and resources needed to create a special series like the recently released 20th anniversary Looking Back Hippers series, and there’s no way for Dreams, at their current production rate, to keep up with Sonny Angels’s booming popularity.
The resell market and radical price gouging for Sonny Angels
The shortage has created a secondary Sonny Angel market where fans can trade or sell Sonnys in their collection. On forums like Reddit or platforms like Discord, Sonny Angel fans have employed collector language (ISO = in search of, DISO = desperately in search of, bf luck = boyfriend luck or the belief that boyfriends will pull better Sonny Angels, UFT = up for trade, and UFS = up for sale) to navigate bartering of Sonnys. The exchange system has created a robust social community, with Sonny Angel fans sending figurines across the US and internationally alongside cute notes, candies, and stickers.
There’s somewhat of a hierarchy here, experts tell me. Among regular Sonny Angels, the Rabbit Sonny Angels, both regular- and lop-eared, and the Strawberry are the most popular. Bok Choy, Frog, Cow, and Garlic are considered honorary all-star Sonny Angels. Secret figures and Robbys are sought after, and collectors will go after the limited series Sonny Angels because they’re usually one and done. After Dreams sells through a special series, it’s not likely you’ll see them on shelves again for a few years, if at all.
Obviously though, this voracity for Sonnys doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Resellers have noticed, which is why you’ll see Sonnys marked for outrageous values on sites like Amazon and eBay. For example, the “secret” figure in the 2023 Cat Life series that wears a pink cat costume and holds a gold-tinted fish goes for $250 on eBay.
Resellers have become such a pain that Chung and Bach, the store owners, put limits on the number of Sonnys that are available to purchase online. Chung checks each order by hand, making sure no one’s cheating the system. If she didn’t, she says, resellers would vaporize her stock and sell them for triple the price on Amazon.
“It doesn’t make us happy to see people paying that much,” Bonheim tells me, noting that Dreams is aware of resale sellers and also limits the number of Sonnys a buyer can purchase and monitors orders for funny business. They don’t want “someone opening a Sonny Angel and asking how much money they can make.”
After all, she points out, a Sonny Angel’s job is to make you happy — if you’re lucky enough to get your hands on one.
