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Charms and Trinkets; How Overconsumption Clutters our Minds

  • motleymagazine
  • Apr 15
  • 3 min read

By Stephen O'Brien



With the rise of 00s nostalgia in film, fashion, and music, trinkets and accessories like charms and little toys have too made a return. Back in the day, phones would be bedazzled and adorned with bright rhinestones, and their built-in charm hooks would hold chains. Nowadays, the rhinestones have been replaced with stickers and CASETIFY cases that show off Taylor Swift lyrics, Barbie-Pink bubbles, or whatever other cultural iconography the owner wants to showcase. 


Sonny Angels – a Japanese toy from Dreams Inc, which debuted in 2004 but gained serious attention through TikTok in 2023 – are another accessory for both phonewear and shelf decor, and released a collaboration with the aforementioned CASETIFY in 2024 for phone cases that matched the ‘Harvest’ series of Angels. Whilst primarily being a ‘blind-box’ toy, a series of Sonny Angels called ‘Hippers’ were released in 2021, and attach to phones in a similar vein to a pop-socket. Accessories like the digital pets Tamagotchi have too made a return as a ‘vintage’ novelty, with sales doubling between 2022 and 2023 and a dedicated store opening in the UK, almost 30 years since they debuted. The fascination with cute, decorative toys that harken to childhood and bright colours is both sweet yet a bit unnerving; are people embracing the silly, or are they just trying to escape reality?


It’s undeniable that Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour led to the modern day ‘friendship’ bracelets craze, which has become a staple of not just her concerts, but of the concerts of most pop stars. It’s all a bit of fun, and the eye-catching bright plastic colours are a way to make yourself stand out… but what exactly are the repercussions of this? Well, when it comes to the plastic beads of friendship bracelets and charms, they are created from plastic nurdles – which about 200 kilotons of them leak into the ocean each year – and are a large contributor to the microplastics being found in marine life, and crucially our own bodies. Of course, the culture around friendship bracelets is to trade them, and to recycle and reuse the beads you buy and collect. Unfortunately, with the quickening of trends and the end of the Eras Tour last December, will these beads continue to be reused, or will they end up in landfills like 50% of all plastic waste?


The worry about what comes after the trend is up is not just applicable to friendship bracelets, but also to the cheap accessories and jewelry from sites like Temu and Shein, that decorate the hair, wrists, and necks of teens and young adults trying to keep up with the exponential rate of trends. AChannel 4 documentary “The Truth About Temu: Dispatches”, exposes the levels of lead in a $4 ‘silver’ necklace to be 10 times greater than the amount allowed in products in the UK. Over 25 times the legal amount of cadmium was also found in a faux-gold chain – cadmium is linked to bone degradation and kidney damage. Not only is this dangerous to the health of the young consumers that these apps target, but this low quality turns the jewelry from wearable to worn thin, fast…


The recent obsession with accessorizing outfits, phones, and handbags with charms and trinkets, in an almost kitschy way, may have spawned from a desire to ‘return’ to childhood and the comfort of sentimentality. This consumerist approach of fixating on the bright cutesy colours of plastic is only leading to mass production of these items, which will ultimately end up not as the pretty decorative clutter of charms and keychains, but as a harmful waste poisoning our planet, as well as ourselves. 


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