Throwback Thursday: When a Plastic Plant Became Beijing’s Hottest Hair Accessory

Throwback Thursday takes a look back into Beijing's past, using our 14-year-strong blog archives as the source for a glance at the weird and wonderful stories of Beijing's days gone by.

If you were in Beijing seven years ago to the month and weren’t living under a rock, you almost certainly noticed a bizarre trend in local fashion: that young women near-ubiquitously took to wearing a plastic plant in their hair. We’re not talking about a flower, either, but a simple green beansprout that, even at the price of RMB 1 per sprout, must have turned quite a profit for the hutong vendors and Taobao store operators who latched onto the trend.

Why? No why. At the time, Beijinger editor Robynne Tindall filed the fad under "things I will never understand about modern China." The closest thing to an explanation was apparently that the fake weeds had been popularized at a cosplay convention and somehow went mainstream shortly thereafter. Personally, I prefer this explanation to the speculative theory that Beijingers were sporting the sprouts to express solidarity with the environment because the former narrative avoids facing the irony that these city folk believed buying a piece of plastic was a way to express their eco-friendly attitude.

At the height of the trend, one Taobao store was reportedly selling over 10,000 sprouts per month. In some parts of town, you could find more colorful varieties, but most popular by far was the simple two-leafed green variety that inexplicably earned the nickname 聪明草 cōngmíng cǎo, or clever grass, from netizens who apparently weren’t clever enough to find a piece of grass on the ground and clip it to their hair.

In all, the memory of this little green fad reminds us that you just can’t predict what odd trend will strike in China next, whether it’s a traveling frog or courtroom dating. Whatever comes next, though, we’ll tell you about it in the Beijinger.

READ: Throwback Thursday: The First Ever Hot Chili Eating Competition … in Canada?!

Image: Taobao, Weibo