Kewpie: the man? the mayo? the legend!

An exploration into Kewpies, their influence, and why we all love them.

Mar 28, 2025

This week I started reading Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. In the first chapter he describes a woman’s yellow hair being “like that of a circus kewpie doll.” This caught my attention because I thought Kewpie was a mayo brand, not a doll. So of course I started to look up what a kewpie doll was and when I found some for sale on eBay I thought that they looked like vintage Sonny Angels. Could this be the original naked baby figurine collectible? Was it a boy? A girl? Neither? Why did it look so familiar?

The man? No - the woman!

Let’s start from the beginning - who created the Kewpie doll? Rose O’Neill was an IT girl in the 18th century. She was the first published female cartoonist in the US and, for a time, the highest paid female illustrator in the world! Active in the women’s suffrage movement and considered a modern woman, she would go on to use her artistic abilities to create an icon that would last generations. She created the Kewpies - little fairy-like baby creatures inspired by the Roman god of love - Cupid. She was so obsessed with them she dreamt of them. In her autobiography she said, “I thought about the Kewpies so much that I had a dream about them where they were all doing acrobatic pranks on the coverlet of my bed.”

Her Kewpie comic strip was first published in a women’s magazine, Ladies Home Journal in 1909, and later in Woman’s Home Companion and Good Housekeeping. People LOVED the Kewpies and since she saw great success with the comic strip, she began to include paper doll versions of Kewpie, which in 1912 became a doll. They came in different sizes ranging from 1 inch to 12 inches. Kewpie dolls are considered to be the first mass produced toy in the US. O’Neill changed the course of comics and dolls forever!

As for the gender of kewpies - it is clear that they serve non-binary realness and they are confirmed genderless beings!

Mayonnaise? Yes.

If you opened my fridge today, you could find some kewpie mayonnaise hiding in between all of my sauces. This was my first introduction to this mayonnaise mascot: the kewpie doll. But how did this little enby go from being a feminist figure to a they/them mayo logo? Around the time that O’Neill was publishing her comics in magazines, a young Toichiro Nakashima was traveling through the UK and the US for an internship with the Department of Agriculture and Commerce of Japan. While in the US he discovered a funny spread used in potato salad - mayo. He thought it was so delightful that he came up with his own recipe and started a business to market his mayo in Japan.

Kewpie fans were not exclusive to the States, their popularity spread all over the world including, you guessed it, Japan. It is not clear why Nakashima chose O’Neill’s little cherub to be the face of his new company, but it can be assumed that it was due to their widespread popularity. Kewpie has become a cultural icon in Japan and has spread far beyond just sandwich bread. From the very beginning the kewpie figure was part of the branding and continues to be a vital part of the brand (as seen in the image below).

In 1998 the Kewpie Mayo was sued by someone who had bought Kewpie doll in Japan for using the Kewpie as their logo. What the doll company may not have realized was that Kewpie is public domain! The courts sided with the mayo company and the rest is history!

The Legend

It is clear that O’Neill was ahead of her time with her dream cherubs as they permeate our culture to this day. Brandy Melville has kewpies, or character that look like them, all over their clothes, Cotton-On and Urban Outfitters have partnerships with Kewpie, and we have a whole Japanese condiment brand that adopted the name!

Rose O’Neill’s influence has been multi-generational. I found a post about someone researching their family history and within their grandfather’s records from 1942, they found that he had gotten a Kewpie doll tattooed on his chest! I wouldn’t be surprised if a twenty something is getting a Kewpie tramp stamp as I write this in 2025.

Is it the oncoming recession? or the impending doom that zoomers have been feeling their whole lives? What is driving a generation to invest in little naked cherubs? I believe that young adults’ fascination with figurines, blind boxes and trinkets are proof that we live in a world trying to reclaim innocence and childlike wonder. Sonny Angels, Smiskis, and Zimomos can be found in the homes of many Gen Z adults today - displayed on shelves, phone cases, laptops or even proudly sported on a belt loop.

Some may say that the last 2 decades have been chock full of unprecedented events: 9/11, the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, a criminal president, a world-wide pandemic, the beginnings of fascism… and the list goes on and on. These events combined with the ever present internet have robbed us of our innocence and maybe we are reclaiming it with toys.

Thanks so much for reading! If you would like to learn more about Rose O’Neill or anything I mentioned in this essay please check out my sources below.