Caricatures become an obsession

For Anokhy Desai, a new haircut or outfit requires more than a trip to the shopping center. These days, she also finds herself also diving into the Bitmoji app to chop hair and replace clothes.

It's there that Desai and millions of other people have created personalized caricatures of themselves. Bitmoji attaches the cartoonish likenesses to funny and cheesy phrases and then stamps them on images that can be shared across social media.

The hilarity and absurdity of those images has turned Bitmoji into one of the most-downloaded apps in the world, and its illustrations have taken over text-messaging threads and Snapchat conversations. They've become such an important form of self-expression that it's common to encounter people, like Desai, who regularly update their Bitmoji avatars to reflect new hairdos and fashion choices. The most devoted among them boast that they spend more time picking out clothes for their Bitmoji than their real-world self - a level of care unlike anything before, experts in the virtual reality industry say.