‘You can tell the fakes by the number of teeth’: My counterfeit Labubu conundrum

I stood bewildered by the choice inside the crammed Cabramatta variety store in south-western Sydney last month after asking the sweet shopkeeper if she had any Labubu dolls – the cult accessory of 2025, found hanging off designer handbags – for my four-year-old great-niece’s birthday.

“Ah, Lafufu,” she said, uttering the generic term for fake Labubus before taking me to the back of the store and pulling out dozens of sealed, Labubu-branded boxes. Fakes in official-looking packaging are common. They also feature Labubu’s “blind boxing” strategy, creating a game of chance about which of the 300 dolls is inside. Rare Labubus can sell for hundreds. I wasn’t too concerned that my $15 box contained a Lafufu. It was half the price of the real thing, and I’d been turned off visiting the official store by hyped media reports of long queues and stock shortages.

In July, NSW Fair Trading issued a warning about difficult-to-discern counterfeit Labubus. Surely a pre-schooler would be none the wiser? At another store I found a range of outfits, modelled on a real Labubu, such as a mini “Dior” ensemble comprising monogrammed straw boater hat, jacquard dress featuring the brand’s iconic interlocking logo and a minuscule diamante “J’ADIOR” jewel. Doll and Dior for $45, bargain!

Created in 2015 by illustrator Kasing Lung, Labubus were licensed to Beijing toy company Pop Mart in 2019. Already popular across Asia, the dolls went global this year. Last month, Madonna had one as a birthday cake. In June, Forbes named Pop Mart’s founder and CEO, Wang Ning, China’s 10th-richest person, worth $US22.7 billion ($35 billion).

China remains the world’s biggest player in the counterfeit trade, the source of 90 per cent of fakes seized by US customs in 2024. Labubu’s homegrown success has presented a counterfeiting conundrum for China’s own customs officials, who detected hundreds of thousands of products suspected of infringing Labubu copyright between April and August. Judging by the brisk trade I witnessed in Cabramatta, plenty of fakes are still getting out.

Later, at my great-niece’s birthday party, while handing over my gift, I noticed one of the mothers’ handbags had two “real” Labubus. I whispered to her about my Lafufu suspicions, to which Labubu Mum declared, a little too loudly: “You can tell the fakes by the number of teeth; real ones have nine.” I cringed and admitted I wasn’t exactly sure how many teeth my doll had.

While Pop Mart offers online authentication codes to verify Labubu provenance, fakes are clearly taking a big bite of its market.

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