Name: LOL Surprise! dolls.
Age: In doll years, about seven. Manufacturing dates from about April this year.
Appearance: Brighter-coloured Bratz Babyz.
So, I’m guessing this is a collectible doll for children? They are the plastic population of a juvenile consumer hellscape, yes.
Breathe. Please explain. They are vibrantly hued little plastic dolls aimed at five- to 12-year-olds. They cost about £10 each and there are 45 to collect.
Yuck. And each one comes wrapped in seven layers of paper and encased in a plastic ball.
Double yuck. And you don’t know which one you’ve bought until you’ve opened it.
Call me an embittered, old cynic, but I’m beginning to detect a faintest whiff of exploitation here. Only of children’s natural acquisitiveness, vulnerability to manipulative marketing tactics, untrammelled willingness to pester parents to indulge the whims of their moment and of parents’ inability to withstand much of it, especially at Christmas.
They are the latest must-have toy, then? Yes, they are this year’s Hatchimals/Tamagotchi/Girl’s World/sugar cane and tin cup (delete according to age and whether or not you are Laura Ingalls Wilder).
The packaging seems like an especially cruel and unnecessary twist. Indeed. It is designed to hook into the online “unboxing” craze.
I’m just going to swallow a couple of my pills before I ask what this is. I sense no good is about to come. I’ll wait, because you’re right.
OK, I’m back. What gives? Unboxing is the practice of unpacking your “swag” – usually expensive tech products, clothes or makeup and beauty products for adults – on YouTube. Children are filmed unpacking new toys.
What is it about this that makes me want to run screaming for the hills and start building a lead-lined bunker? The thoughtless, grasping greed of it all? Acquisition as entertainment? The corruption of souls? The moulding of malleable young minds to create insatiable monsters designed to drive the engines of capitalism, which eventually will suck us all into their unforgiving depths and mangle us into bloodied carcasses?
That may be it. Merry Christmas.
Do say: “No.”
Don’t say: “Gotta unpack them all!”
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