'Grass hairpins' expose 'the naked ape' in us

A weird but interesting trend has spread across China's social network sites: selfies of people with grass "growing" out of their heads. In fact, it's not rare to see people with hairpins with plastic grass on their heads on the streets. Some celebrities, too, have joined the trend.

It's interesting to see this ACG (animation, comic and game) fashion trend spreading to the real world. But psychologically speaking, it's an accidental phenomenon thanks to the social prevalence rule and common human mindset.

"Grass growing out of the head" is a typical way, in the ACG world, of portraying a cartoon character's dorky but adorable nature. Actually, such cartoon characters have a strand of hair sticking out of the head. The strand of hair has evolved into a tuft of grass, because of the similarity between hair and grass. The image of a cartoon character with a tuft of grass on the head spread from sub-culture circles to mainstream culture through a set of emoticons on Wechat. The cartoon character in the emoticons is a white globular creature with grass growing out of its head.