THE GREAT FIDGET CRAZE OF 2026

Photo taken from Canva.

Annika Peterson | Opinion | May

   Fidgets and stress toys have been all over the place lately, being used as stress relief for years now. However, recently, there has been a steep increase in the number of people using fidgets. On social media, new fidgets and products are being promoted every day, and audiences buy these fidgets up. Influencers can be seen with massive fidget collections, buying up blind boxes and trying to get the new, trendy fidgets. All this consumption of fidgets poses a singular question: how many fidgets is too many?

   Fidgets became a trend around the mid 2010s, with things like slime and fidget spinners becoming all the rage. Stores would be raided, their fidget stock gobbled up by children and teens alike. Since then, fidgets have become a staple of the household, with new varieties appearing every year. With fidgets being a hot topic, influencers have also hopped onto the bandwagon, creating channels and personalities around them.

   When influencers began getting involved with fidget content, they mostly published videos of fidget repairs, staged fidget trades, where to find affordable fidgets, and much more. However, overtime, the content shifted. Now, it feels like more and more fidget influencers are showing off their fidget collections, consisting of the same fidgets with different color schemes.

   One of the hot fidget brands in 2026 is Needoh, a brand which specializes in squishies. Needoh has a variety of squishies with a variety of fillings, and they come in many different shapes, sizes, and colors. Due to this, they have become a trend on social media, and many people have been buying them up from stores like Scheels, Target, and Walmart. The toy aisles of these stores are often empty, their shelves cleared of any Needohs and other trending fidgets. In fact, this trend has gotten so bad that some stores have begun to remove Needohs from the floor entirely.

   The fact that stores feel the need to hide their fidget stock from the people participating in the fidget craze speaks volumes to how poorly these consumers are behaving. This point is made especially clear from one fidget trend: the Five Below dumplings.

   The Five Below dumplings are dumpling shaped squishy toys that come in little baskets, which essentially makes them fidget blind bags. These dumplings look exactly the same, but they come in a multitude of colors. However, this is not the reason why they have become so popular. Rather than having a goal to collect the different colors, people have instead been after the rare glitter dumplings.

   In the hunt for these glitter dumplings, people have bought hundreds of dollars worth of dumplings in hopes of getting a singular glitter dumpling. Viral videos have been making rounds on the internet of grown adults fighting other grown adults or even children in attempts to get as many dumpling containers they can. Influencers sit at their tables, film their unboxing videos, and, if they don’t get a glitter dumpling, begin to freak out. All the while, there are multiples of every other dumpling color sitting on their table, yet they’re focused on going back to buy more dumplings.

   The way that people think they need to have different varieties of the same fidgets is what takes this trend too far. Some people like to have different fidgets with different textures to help them focus, which is how fidgets are supposed to be used. A line is crossed, however, when people feel the need to buy essentially the same fidgets in different colors, building massive collections of fidgets they will never be able to fully use.