My Journey to Buy a Back-Alley Labubu

Based on a character created in 2015 by the Hong Kong artist Kasing Lung and inspired by elvish forest monsters of Nordic folklore, each Labubu—no bigger than an iPhone—features soft fur, spiky claws, a pronounced brow ridge, and a grinning row of jagged teeth. (All Labubus are canonically female, though they have a reclusive male leader, Zimomo, who has a dragonlike tail.) In recent months, I’d seen them on TikTok and Instagram, being birthed from mylar pouches in the unboxing videos…