Young Koreans find peace in palm of their hands

Shoppers browse toys and stationery at Dongdaemun Toy and Stationery Market in Seoul, May 3. Newsis

Walk down a narrow alley in Changsin-dong, a neighborhood in Jongno District tucked behind Dongdaemun in central Seoul, and you will find a scene that seems frozen in time. Shopfronts overflow with plastic toys, character stickers and school supplies, the same stationery and toy wholesale market that has supplied Korean classrooms for decades.

Look closer at the crowd, though, and something has changed.

The customers digging through bins of colorful rubbery blobs are not elementary school students. They are mostly college students or young office workers in their 20s and 30s, many of them clutching phones open to Instagram, hunting for two very specific items — "mallangi" and "wakppu ball."

The two toys have become Korea's unlikeliest trend. Mallangi, derived from the Korean word "mallang," meaning soft and squishy, refers to pliable rubber toys designed to be kneaded, stretched and squeezed. Wakppu ball takes the opposite approach. The palm-sized ball hides a soft filling inside a hard outer shell made of wax, and the entire point is to crush it. Press hard enough and the shell fractures with a satisfying crackle, a sound that has spawned its own genre of autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) content.

The closest reference points for those unfamiliar with the toys might be the fidget spinner craze of the late 2010s, or the global slime boom that followed. But Korea's sensory toy moment has a distinctly local flavor, complete with a physical pilgrimage site, a generational nickname and hard sales data behind the hype.

Instagram search results for "mallangi," left, and "wakppu ball" are shown in these screenshots. Both tactile toys have gained popularity among young consumers in Korea through social media. Captured from Instagram

From pencil cases to therapy tools

A trend driven mostly by younger adults, the toys are less about play than about decompression. Squeezing a mallangi for a few minutes offers a cheap, screen-free way to reset a frazzled mind.

The numbers suggest this is more than a passing curiosity. A search for mallangi on Instagram returns some 120,000 posts, while wakppu ball yields more than 10,000, both as of Tuesday afternoon. On TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, videos of people squeezing mallangi or cracking open wakppu balls rack up hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of views.

The appeal is largely auditory and textural: the quiet squish of rubber, the soft snap of a breaking wax, sounds that ASMR audiences find deeply soothing.

Even the act of buying the toys has become part of the ritual. Rather than ordering online, young consumers travel to Changsin-dong's toy market, now nicknamed the "mallangi mecca" on social media, to touch and compare products in person before choosing one that fits their preferred texture. In a retail landscape dominated by same-day delivery, the analog shopping trip is half the fun.

Tactile toys, including mallangi and wakppu balls, are displayed for sale at a toy shop in Changsin-dong, Jongno District, Seoul, May 1. Korea Times photo by Kim Hee-seo

Morning at the mecca

On a recent morning, the Changsin-dong alley was already humming with activity before noon. Most shoppers appeared to be in their 20s or 30s, moving slowly from one stall to another with smartphones in hand, comparing products they had bookmarked on social media.

Families with young children still wandered through the market, but they were noticeably outnumbered by college students and young office workers on their day off.

Every few steps, customers could be seen stopping to squeeze, poke and stretch different mallangi before carefully placing them back and reaching for another, searching for just the right texture.

A passerby familiar with the neighborhood offered a similar observation.

"This street used to be busy mainly around Children's Day or the start of the school year. Lately it's crowded almost every day, and most of them aren't children at all," said a lady in her 40s surnamed Jeon. "Even the cafes nearby are full of young people carrying bags of squishies, all busy chatting away and squeezing whatever they bought."

The displays themselves are a sensory overload. Shelves groan under piles of squishy toys in every color, from basic palm-sized orbs to elaborate replicas of food — wedges of cheese, enlarged strawberries and peanuts, among others. Wakppu balls come in equally varied colors and textures. Most items cost between 3,000 won and 10,000 won ($2 to $6.6), cheap enough to grab a handful without guilt.

Shoppers could be seen picking up one toy after another, pressing and prodding each in search of the exact firmness they wanted, a tactile version of test-driving.

"We're carefully trying everything out," Yang Yoon-seo, a Gyeonggi Province resident in her 20s visiting the market with her older sister, said with a laugh. "This is my first time here, and we've been planning to come for about a month ... We saw all the posts on Instagram and thought, 'We have to go.' We even saved up for today."

A "Murakkuma" mallangi toy is seen in its plastic wrapper near a stationery market in Seoul's Jongno District, Tuesday. Korea Times photo by Pyo Kyung-min

Hands-on verdict

To understand the appeal, this reporter bought two mallangi toys and one wakppu ball, and put them to the test.

The first was a soap crunch mallangi, a Chinese-made import that has gone viral on Xiaohongshu, the Chinese version of TikTok, before crossing over to Korean social media.

Shaped like a plain white bar of soap with a soft, powdery surface, it looks almost aggressively ordinary.

The magic is in the filling. The toy's thin outer skin is packed with small crunchy flower-shaped beads, so every squeeze produces a dry, crackling rustle, somewhere between the sound of bubble wrap being popped and batter being fried.

The second purchase sat at the opposite end of the market: a handmade mallangi shaped like a round slice of white radish with the face of Rilakkuma, the sleepy bear character from Japan painted smack in the middle.

Fans call it "Murakkuma," a mashup of "mu," the Korean word for radish, and the bear's name. Handmade mallangi like this one occupies the hobby's premium tier, sold primarily through social media accounts and resold on secondhand platforms for nearly double to triple the price of a market-stall squishy.

The craftsmanship showed in the texture. Where the soap crunch is all about sound, the Murakkuma is about density — a firm but buttery flesh that pushes back against the fingers. Collectors even sort handmade mallangi into texture grades, from softer "yogurt" versions to the firmer "butter" types.

The wakppu ball brought the trend full circle. This one was designed as a miniature Dubai Chewy Cookie, the pistachio-filled dessert that swept Korea in 2025 and became one of the country's biggest food crazes in recent years.

The toy mimics the treat faithfully: a chocolate-brown wax shell hiding a pale pistachio-green clay center. Pressing down until the shell gave way the sharp, brittle crack that is the whole point of the genre, followed by the reveal of the soft green interior.

Wakppu ball toys are squeezed to demonstrate their texture, left, while one purchased by this reporter on Tuesday is cracked open to expose its soft interior. Courtesy of Toyto, Korea Times photo by Pyo Kyung-min

After spending several minutes squeezing, stretching and cracking the toys, the appeal became surprisingly easy to understand. None of them felt life-changing, but each provided a brief escape from the endless notifications and screen time that fills a typical workday.

The soap crunch mallangi proved the most addictive thanks to its crisp crackle, while the Murakkuma's dense, buttery resistance made it oddly satisfying to bully through its wrapper. The wakppu ball delivered the biggest moment of anticipation, but also the shortest-lived payoff, as much of its novelty disappeared once the shell had been broken.

The experience was not without drawbacks. The toys carried a faint chemical smell straight out of the packaging, while the surface of both the soap crunch mallangi and the sticky handmade Murakkuma quickly attracted dust and lint after only a few minutes of handling.

As inexpensive sensory diversions, however, the toys largely delivered what they promised — a few quiet minutes of sensory distraction that felt surprisingly effective at resetting a cluttered mind.

A Chinese soap-shaped mallangi loses its original shape after repeated squeezing and stretching by this reporter following a purchase at a stationery market in Seoul's Jongno District, Tuesday. Korea Times photo by Pyo Kyung-min

Cheap thrills, real questions

The economics of the trend is easy to grasp. For the price of a cup of coffee, a stressed-out worker gets a pocket-sized object that demands nothing but a squeeze and delivers a small, reliable jolt of sensory satisfaction.

In a country where long working hours and academic pressure are perennial complaints, a 5,000 won mood reset is an easy sell.

But the boom comes with caveats. Many of the toys are made from plastics and synthetic compounds, and because the toys are handled constantly and pressed directly against the skin, safety-conscious consumers are advised to check for KC certification, Korea's mandatory product safety mark, and to buy from reputable sellers rather than unverified online listings.

Children who use the toys should do so under adult supervision, and any product that breaks open or leaks its filling should be thrown away immediately. The toys' short life span raises environmental questions as well, since many are discarded after only days of use.

Still, none of this seems likely to slow the craze in the short term.

If anything, the friction is part of the story: A generation raised on frictionless digital entertainment is lining up in a decades-old wholesale alley to buy the most analog toys imaginable, objects whose entire value lies on how they feel in the hand.

Whether mallangi and wakppu ball prove more durable than the fidget spinner remains to be seen. For now, in Changsin-dong at least, the sound of Korea unwinding is a soft squish and a sharp crack.