Why We Love the Ugly Doll: Labubu, Beauty, and the Strange Freedom of Not Being Pretty

Pic by Gettyimages - Credit: Edward Berthelot

I first encountered Labubu with a friend shoving their phone in my face and saying, "You have to see this."

On the screen? There she was, this aggressively imperfect creature with jagged teeth, a dead-eyed stare, and the posture of someone who'd given up on good posture around the same time I gave up on skincare routines. My first thought was, "What fresh hell is this?" My second thought was, "Oh god, I think I love her."

Because Labubu looks exactly like how many of us feel at 3 PM on a Wednesday when I realize I've been pronouncing "charcuterie" wrong for thirty-plus years, and my therapist is probably taking notes about my commitment issues.

She's unabashedly, unapologetically not trying, and in a world where we're all performing our highlight reels, there's something profoundly liberating about a doll that said "no thanks" to conventional beauty and chose chaos instead.

WTF Is Labubu? (A Crash Course for the Uninitiated)

Let me paint you a picture: Labubu is a vinyl collectible that looks like your inner child after three espressos and a complete emotional breakdown.

Created by Hong Kong artist Kasing Lung, her aesthetic is a fever dream crossed with a kindergarten art project, featuring pointy ears, shark teeth, and an expression that suggests she's simultaneously plotting world domination and wondering if she left the stove on.

Pop Mart, the Chinese toy giant behind the Labubu phenomenon, has turned her into the must-have collectible of 2024-2025. We're talking blind box culture on steroids. You drop $15-20 on a mystery box, hoping to score that rare variant, like gambling on your emotional well-being. Which, let's be honest, you probably are.

The genius of Labubu isn't her beauty. It's her complete and utter lack thereof. She's what happens when kawaii culture meets existential dread, and somehow, inexplicably, we can't get enough.

The Ugly-Cute Rebellion: Why We're Obsessed with Imperfection

Here's the thing about living in 2025: we're drowning in a sea of filtered faces, ring lights, and the suffocating pressure to be perpetually on. Every mirror is a potential content opportunity, every angle a chance to fail the impossible standard of effortless perfection. We've become a generation of people who apologize for existing in our natural state.

Enter Labubu, stage left, giving exactly zero fucks about your beauty standards. There is a Japanese concept called "wabi-sabi," which finds beauty in imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness. Labubu is wabi-sabi if wabi-sabi got day drunk and decided to start a fight with conventional aesthetics. She represents something we've forgotten how to be: authentically, messily human.

When we clutch our Labubu figures, we're not just holding a toy; we're holding a piece of our past. We're holding permission. Permission to be weird, to take up space without apology, to exist without the exhausting performance of being "pretty enough." She's ugly-cute in the same way that crying at commercials is ugly-cute, or the way your laugh sounds when something genuinely surprises you with joy.

The ugly-cute rebellion isn't about celebrating ugliness. It's about expanding our definition of what's worthy of love and affection. And frankly, it's about time.

Kidults, Capitalism & Comfort Objects: The Psychology of Grown-Ass Adults Buying Toys

Let's address the elephant in the room: why are adults spending their rent money on toys that look like they were designed by someone having a very specific kind of breakdown?

Welcome to the "kidult" movement, where millennials and Gen Z have collectively decided that if we can't afford houses, at least we can afford tiny plastic representations of our inner emotional state. We're the generation that grew up being told to mature, to be responsible, to put away childish things, and then the world handed us an economy that feels like a game rigged against us, a climate crisis that makes long-term planning feel like a joke, and social media that turned our insecurities into content.

So yeah, we're buying toys. Sue us.

But here's the deeper truth: Labubu isn't just a collectible. She's a comfort object for people who were told they outgrew comfort objects. She's the therapy you can hold, a tangible reminder that it's okay to feel small, weird, and imperfect in a world that demands you be anything but.

Psychologists call this "transitional object attachment," the adult version of that raggedy stuffed animal that got you through childhood. Except now, our stuffed animals have credit cards and existential crises, and they cost more than our first car.

Scarcity Culture & the Beauty Trap: Same Dopamine, Different Packaging

The blind box phenomenon is just the beauty industry wearing a different outfit to the same devastating party. Think about it: limited edition makeup drops, exclusive skincare launches, the panic-inducing scarcity of being "chosen" by an algorithm, a brand, or a potential romantic partner.

We've been trained to believe that rarity equals value, that if something is hard to get, it must be worth having. The beauty industry has built an empire on this logic, convincing us that the right lipstick, the perfect skin routine, and the ideal body type will finally make us worthy of love and attention.

But here's where Labubu breaks the system: she's rare without being aspirational. She's a limited edition without promising to fix you. The scarcity still triggers that dopamine hit, but instead of chasing an impossible beauty standard, you're chasing a deliberately imperfect toy that looks like she's given up on trying to impress anyone.

It's the same psychological manipulation but pointed in a different direction—toward acceptance rather than improvement, toward celebrating the weird rather than perfecting the conventional.

Embrace Your Inner Labubu: The Strange Freedom of Not Being Pretty

I'm thirty-something years old, and I'm tired of being pretty. Not that I was conventionally pretty, to begin with, but I've got the kind of face that's "interesting" on good days and "challenging" on bad ones. But I'm tired of the work of trying to be pretty. The angles, the filters, the constant internal negotiation between how I look and how I feel I should look.

Labubu doesn't know she's not pretty. Or maybe she does, and she's decided that pretty is someone else's problem. There's something revolutionary about that kind of self-possession, that absolute rejection of the beauty performance that's been choreographed for us since birth.

When I look at my Labubu collection (yes, I have a collection now, don't judge me), I see tiny monuments to the parts of myself I've been taught to hide: the messy emotions, the awkward angles, the moments when I'm more gremlin than goddess. She's proof that you can be loved without being lovely, that you can be collected, cherished, and desired without fitting into anyone else's definition of desirable.

This is what I wish I could tell my younger self, the one who spent hours trying to make her nose look smaller, or her smile look more symmetrical: that weirdness is a superpower, that flaws are just personality made visible, that the most magnetic people are the ones who've stopped trying to be magnetic and started being real.

Your crow's feet aren't failures. They're evidence of laughter. Your cellulite isn't a flaw. It's proof that you're human, not a mannequin. Your weird laugh, your crooked teeth, and your inability to take a good photo aren't bugs in your system; they're features.

The Mic Drop

Here's what Labubu taught me: 'Ugly' is just another word for 'free.'

Free from the exhausting performance of perfection. Free from the constant surveillance of your own appearance. Free from the suffocating need to be palatable, pretty, and pleasing to everyone who might glance in your direction.

In a world that profits from your insecurity, choosing to love what's imperfect in a toy, in yourself, and in others is a radical act of self-love. It's a quiet revolution happening one weird little doll at a time, one person at a time, deciding that they're done apologizing for taking up space in their own skin.

So go ahead: buy the ugly doll. Embrace the awkward photo. Let your weird flag fly. The world needs more Labubus and fewer apologies for existing exactly as you are. If a bug-eyed monster doll can trend globally, so can you, unfiltered, unairbrushed, and unapologetic.

Because at the end of the day, we're all just strange little creatures trying to figure out how to be human, and maybe, just maybe, that's precisely what makes us beautiful.

By Sypharany.