The frenzy for squishy toys shows the squeeze of keeping up with a new fad

At the beginning of June, a raid on a Glasgow warehouse resulted in the seizure of almost 6,000 dumpling squishies. Perhaps this means nothing to you. Perhaps you don’t have children between the ages of nine and 13, who collect, clean, modify, squeeze and yearn for these small lumps of malleable plastic, for the NeeDoh gumdrops, Nice Cubes, butter sticks or large-holed cheese. Perhaps, when hurriedly searching for a photo on your phone, you’re not required to scroll through infinite videos of small hands palpating purple rubber spheres, of glittery octopi shimmering beside large lung-like balls. In which case, if you are keen to keep up on the culture, it is important to understand, first that the biggest kids trend at the moment is the squishy, a fidget toy that comes in increasingly surreal shapes and textures, and second, that the panic has set in.

The panics, I should say, plural, as they come from two directions. There is the children’s panic of desire, as global demand for NeeDohs means they’re sold out everywhere. My daughter, having heard a rare rumour that our local Waterstones had new stock, dashed up there with her friend to find a crowd of teenagers buying all they could find, and being (a fact relayed with shock, fear, a little awe) “Very very rude to the person on the till.” Across the world, shops have introduced rationing as if trading post-war sugar, largely because the rudeness has not been limited to teenagers – adults, too, are reported to have screamed at store employees, threatened other customers and called the police on each other. On resale sites these squishies are being sold for 10 times their original price. This panic is fairly established – it’s the panic you’ll remember from the days of Pogs, or Beanie Babies, or Rubik’s cubes, but intensified due to social media, resulting in a feverish thirst that descends in the playground and leads to parental nagging so prolonged it causes a mother to lie face-down on the pavement begging, begging for peace.

The newer panic, that arrived earlier this year, is one of adult fear. Part of it seems to me to be grounded in a vague but pointed moral hysteria. Squishies are an extension of fidget toys, now widely rolled out to children with autism and ADHD, a fact  that immediately pushes the internal buzzers of those obsessed with the idea that children are being overdiagnosed. The rise of these toys taps on callous political pressure points, despite being harmless and despite looking like anthropomorphic dim sum.

I say harmless, but there is an element of adult panic that is grounded in genuine risk. The Glasgow raid seized counterfeit toys – news stories in the Scottish press are illustrated by photos of the small, seized plastic dumplings, their black, painted eyes gazing up from a box with confusion and the silent plea that these dumplings only wanted to be loved. But the threat of counterfeit squishies (a huge market now that major suppliers have run out of stock) is that they frequently fail health and safety checks. These squishies, reported the BBC, may contain substances “such as phthalates, solvents and formaldehyde, and emit strong chemical odours, which can cause allergic reactions,” like skin irritation, nausea, headaches and breathing problems. Products may “fail to meet flammability standards and can split open, resulting in unknown contents spilling out and posing a further risk of harm”. Some of the fake products, one retailer said, “actually smell of petrol”.

Personally, I love a fad, in part because of their implicit foolishness, but also I enjoy the treasure hunt thrill, the whole community of the thing. I am warmed by the way children communicate through their attachment to these nonsense objects – I loved, deeply, the passing 13-year-old girl who, when she saw my shy child kneading a squishy, drily offered a quiet, “Slay.” My daughter visibly bloomed. There is some delicious irony, too, in the fact that the toys we squeeze to release stress might be filled with the very stressors – the toxins, forever plastics, the awful, terrifying smells – that we are squeezing to manage. Or there would be, I guess, were it not for the indistinct possibility of death. Still, I’ll miss these things tomorrow, when they’re gone.

Photograph by Alamy