Most children who grew up in Estonia during the last gasps of the Soviet Union, have a special relationship with stickers. Stickers were inherently western – unnecessary, shiny and bright – and therefore desirable. Me and my brother had an entire side of a cupboard covered in car stickers, and I wore my initials stuck to my flute case, in neon yellow and accompanied by pictures of Donald Duck.

Of all the crazes of my childhood/youth, this was one I never expected to go through again, but here we are. It started a few years ago when my daughter became old enough for stickers and wanted to pimp my things with adding a Hello Kitty or two. We have now reached a stage where I actively encourage her to put stickers on my things. I’ve got Rainbow Dash on my iPhone and a light blue fat Japanese creature on my iPad. The Japanese ones are my favourites (I adore Totoro!), but anything cute will do.

I’m definitely not alone in this, there seems to be a bona fide trend going on for some time already. If the uber-cool beauty brand Glossier sends out their products with a sheet of stickers included, you know something is happening. Or look at the bags of Anya Hindmarch, clearly inspired by badges and stickers, plus the actual leather stickers you can buy separately. Then there are the stickers you can use online (I’m using the cat in Facebook messenger every chance I get) and the temporary tattoos you can by at any cheap accessories shop that are basically stickers for your body. I’ve been wearing a delicate silver butterfly on my hand for two days and I love it.

I’m sure one could analyse this phenomenon in a very intellectual manner. To point out that today’s society is in many ways infantile, hence the popularity of not only stickers, but cartoons and comics and My Little Pony. To emphasise the influence of the Japanese and Korean pop-culture in recent years. To recall the omnipresent obsession with personalising and maybe postulate that we use stickers on luxury items to signal that we don’t take them too seriously – a tiny, cute (futile) rebellion. If one is really into trendcasting, one could even say that we are moving from normcore to chaos magic.

This is all wonderful. Please feel free to go ahead with the discussion. I’ll be on the sofa, selecting the perfect sticker for my notebook. Or maybe I should use several?

Pictured: stickers, temporary tattoos, Glossier Balm Dotcom, tiara by Tanel Veenre.