Sorry to Labubu, but there’s a new (or rather old) bag charm in town: the Tamagotchi. Now in their third decade Earthside, the creatures from Cyberspace (IYKYK) have proved far more resilient than their fleeting lifespans would suggest. Palm-sized and brightly-hued, needy and noisy, the egg-shaped devices that once hung from elementary schoolers’ backpacks in the 90s are back and bigger than ever.

In 2025, Tamagotchi secured collaborations with pop megastars like BLACKPINK and fashion labels like Coperni, celebrated its 30th anniversary with a museum exhibition in Tokyo, and surpassed 100 million units sold. Outside of official channels, a whole cottage industry of merchandise inspired by the toy (ceramics! crochet! cross stitch! phone cases! semi-precious jewelry!) has sprung up. Seasoned collectors trade tips on forums like TamaTalk; creators share advice for newcomers on YouTube.

What’s to thank for the toy’s resurgence? Of course, there’s the Y2K nostalgia — a force to be reckoned with, but not without its limits. The Tamagotchi’s successors in the digital pet space, for instance (the Furby, the Sony Aibo, the Poo-Chi, Neopets), remain fondly remembered relics, having failed to entice subsequent generations. And while Bandai Namco has expanded the Tamagotchi brand to include more immersive video games and apps, the handheld device — now available in a handful of variations, from the original to the jazzed-up, color-screened Tamagotchi Paradise and the “Tamaverse”-enabled Tamagotchi Uni — remains the brand’s central offering. There’s just something about that egg.

The ovoid shape is likely inspired by the Tamagotchi creatures’ first form: an 8-bit egg, which “hatches” before the user’s eyes at the onset of the game. It’s a brilliant hook — witness the miracle of life in miniature, feel your caretaking instincts kick into gear — even if it wasn’t intentionally made as such. Regardless, it seems the toy’s creator, Akihiro Yokoi, had eggs on the brain from the jump. The name Tamagotchi itself is a portmanteau of the Japanese words for “egg” and “watch”; in early design drafts, it was worn on the wrist, and was only later switched to a handy, attachable keychain.

Its return certainly dovetails with the rise of the bag charm, and the broader urge to personalize — you know, the silk scarves wrapped around purse handles, the elaborate phone case-and-keychain combos, the bedazzled headphones. In this context, the Tamagotchi is doubly fun: It can be used to accessorize a bag, but it’s also a surface to be accessorized. (See: The many TikToks and Reels of users slipping their eggs into silicone cases, stringing them to beaded tassels, and lining their screens with rhinestones. As many Etsy stores are out there selling Tamagotchi-inspired merchandise, there are more offering merchandise for the Tamagotchi.)

It’s also of a piece with the larger cozy gaming trend, which romanticizes mundane, cute games (your Animal Crossings, your Stardew Valleys) and colorful, distinctive hardware — a direct reaction against the ragebait-riddled platforms and sleek products that’ve been coming out of Silicon Valley as of late. In many cases, the same creators making videos about pastel mechanical keyboards and retooling old iBooks are touting their Tamagotchi collections. Faced with technology that seeks to make itself invisible — the computers hiding in Meta’s Ray-Bans, the ever-shrinking earpods — it’s only natural that we’d yearn for bolder, more individualizable devices. Wearables are just accessories, after all.

Ironically, when they first debuted, the Tamagotchi was seen as a pioneer of the always-on tech world, much to the chagrin of teachers and parents whose lives were routinely interrupted by the bitmap creature’s cries. In fact, some of the earliest moral panics about tech addiction were sparked by the eggs; the human propensity to form emotional attachments to software and machines was dubbed the “Tamagotchi effect.” In the face of LLM chatbots and AI-powered robots, such fears seem quaint. Perhaps that’s also part of the Tamagotchi’s appeal in 2026: a sense of digital connection, without the uncanniness of an interaction with AI. Consider, too, how a single-use device becomes increasingly appealing in the age of the smartphone, with its multiplicity of apps, all engineered to be addictive: Try as you might, you can’t doomscroll on a Tamagotchi.