The Weirdest Singles Day Products of 2021
What were the strangest products on China’s top e-commerce platform this year?
淘宝奇葩商品年度盘点又来啦！
Professional sleep-inducement
A Taobao shop sells the services of a “sleep inducer” (Taobao)
Price range
30 – 100 RMB per half-hour, or 150 – 600 for a whole day
What?
With insomnia on the rise among China’s stressed-out, phone-addicted millennials, sales of all sleep-aid products have been at an all-time high. The weirdest of the bunch, though, has to be this service: hiring someone talk to you over a video or voice call, tell you stories, play you songs and ASMR noises, and otherwise try to put you to sleep. The service is also available over WeChat and QQ groups, as well as various apps dedicated to tracking and improving the user’s sleep. Some sleep-inducers on Taobao also offer their services in waking you up in the morning, or comforting you when you’re down.
One merchant TWOC messaged on Taobao prices their services by hour, ranks their sleep-inducers by level of experience and “emotional intelligence,” and states that customers can change to speaking to a different service provider within five minutes if they are unsatisfied with the experience. However, if the customer fails to go to sleep, they can only obtain a refund if the sleep-inducer is obviously at fault.
Messages from African children
Adverts for well-wishes from children in Africa (Zhihu)
Price range
Depends on the content: 50 – 300 RMB all available
What?
What’s Taobao without a whiff of racist exploitation? Screenshots have periodically surfaced online showing e-merchants offering to shoot videos of “African children” (and sometimes “Indian children,” or adults supposedly from an African country) shouting a birthday greeting, wedding wish, advertisement, or other customized messages in Chinese for the client. Often, the children will be standing beside a chalkboard with the same message written in Chinese characters. TWOC was unable find this exact service on Taobao, but did locate plenty of similar listings for customized videos with well-wishes shouted by muscular men, assorted foreigners, “Ukrainian beauties,” and “influencers.”
Face-shapers
These products on Taobao claim to help customers achieve the coveted “V”-shaped jaw (Taobao)
What?
Want something interactive instead? The “face-exerciser” is a small balloon which you can blow on for a recommended three minutes per day to get rid of your double chin. Or consider the “smile-maker” an instrument shaped like a duckbill you can hold in your mouth for three 15-second sets, twice a day, to achieve curvier lips. For slimming and raising the bridge of the nose, you can sleep with the nose-shaping clamp…if not for all the reviews saying it’s impossible to breathe with it on.
The “smile-maker”(bottom left), “face-exerciser” (top left), and nose-shaping clamp (Taobao)
Great Hall of the People ceiling light
Get that political feel to your next boardroom discussion with this meeting room light (Taobao)
Price range
What?
Boost the dignity of your meeting rooms, or just your apartment, with this light fixture modeled on the famous starry ceiling in the auditorium of the Great Hall of the People, the meeting place of China’s top legislature. The original was designed in the late 1950s by a team of well-known architects including Zhao Dongri and Zhang Bo.
Luck
Luck for sale on Taobao (Taobao)
Price range
What?
Like the “IQ Top-Up” and “A Lesson” featured in our previous lists, this seems to be the latest iteration of pointless Taobao listings that asks you to send merchants money for no tangible product in return. In this case, you simply purchase as many “units” of good luck as you feel is needed. Reviews indicate it is mostly purchased in order to meet the minimum purchase needed to qualify for free shipping or discounts on the merchant’s other products…and just maybe, ace that upcoming exam too.
Genius toilet paper
Learn while you poop with the “genius toilet paper” (Taobao)
Price range
What?
Chinese authorities may be taking action to reduce the burden of study on primary school students by banning after school tutoring and homework assignment at the lower grades, but the pressure of entrance exams for high school and college remain as high as ever. If you’re worried that your student’s grades might go down the toilet, consider a gift of toilet paper printed with study materials—such as English vocabulary, physics equations, or Tang poetry—so they don’t waste a single moment of potential exam-prep time during the day.
Cover image by VCG
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