Sonny Angels, from TikTok trend to SNL sketch fodder, explained.
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?
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.
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.
