Why Do People Keep Throwing Dr. Simi Dolls at Celebrities?

CHOLULA, Mexico—As Lady Gaga sang a particularly dramatic moment of the song "Hold My Hand" during a recent summer concert in Toronto, a small stuffed toy soared over the crowd, and smacked her in the head.

She gamely kept on singing, but the international superstar was the latest to be blindsided on stage by Dr. Simi—the mustachioed mascot of a discount off-brand Mexican chain of pharmacies. Over the past 15 months, Mexican fans have bombarded the concerts of everyone from The Killers and Miley Cyrus, to Rammstein with Dr. Simi dolls in an odd viral trend that has taken the live music industry by storm.

Every Mexican has come to recognize the boisterous oversized doctor mascot that dances in front of the thousands of Similares pharmacy locations around the country since its inception 25 years ago. But it was only recently people started hurling them at concerts, and what started as a fad in Mexico has gone global.

Dr. Simi is the mascot of an off-brand Mexican pharmacy who's slogan is "The same but cheaper." (Photo: Nathaniel Janowitz for VICE News)

At a November concert in Monterrey, Mexico, Harry Styles busted moves with a Dr. Simi doll after catching it midair, clutching it to his chest and swaying his hips. Dua Lipa picked a Dr. Simi doll up mid-concert to briefly serenade it, and a shirtless Justin Bieber gave the doll a brief side eye and kicked it off stage.

But Rubén Albarrán, the lead singer from Café Tacvba, one of Mexico's biggest bands, bit the doll's head off during a concert in Belgium, sparking controversy in Mexico. The video went viral, prompting many to question the value of the growing tradition, and whether it was a point of pride for the nation, or an embarrassment.

"I hate Dr. Simi," Albarrán said in Spanish before ripping the doll's head off to the cheering, albeit seemingly confused, mostly European crowd. "You wanted blood," he said, throwing Simi's severed head back into the audience with his teeth.

The bizarre trend continues to surprise the most famous musicians, while delighting, perplexing or angering fans around the globe. And the Similares pharmacy chain is getting some of the best free publicity in modern history.

My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way picked up the small doll thrown on stage while performing a June concert in Budapest.

"Is this, um, Colonel Sanders from Kentucky Fried Chicken? Is it the Monopoly Man?" asked Way from the seminal 2000s pop punk band. "He's just a gentleman in a fine white suit." A couple of fans in the now viral video shouted the doll's name: "Dr. Simi! From Mexico!"

"I think that every Mexican, without exception, has seen a Dr. Simi dancing outside of a pharmacy," said Alejandro Flores, 25, who threw the doll on stage at the My Chemical Romance concert. He’d traveled for weeks around Europe with Dr. Simi in his bag, waiting to throw it at one of his favorite bands.

"I didn't want to miss participating in the tradition either," Flores told VICE World News.

The My Chemical Romance video went particularly viral though because Flores wrote in sharpie on the back of the doll's white jacket asking the band to tour several Latin American countries, including Mexico.

"Well, we’re going to go to Mexico I think," said Way, to an elated cheer. Within weeks it was confirmed: My Chemical Romance would be one of the headliners at Corona Capital 2022, generally considered the biggest festival of the year in Mexico.

It seemed serendipitous because the trend of lobbing Dr. Simi dolls on stage actually began at Corona Capital 2021. By the time My Chemical Romance headlined Friday night's main stage of the three day festival a year later in November, nearly every major act performing had Dr. Simi stuffed toys thrown on stage.

Dr. Simi dolls are made in a wide range of costumes like a matador or a chef, to a baseball player. (Photo: Nathaniel Janowitz for VICE News)

The trend began as an accident, said 20-year-old Avril Vega, who smuggled the Dr. Simi doll that first went viral into the 2021 Corona Capital festival. On her way to the festival, she’d realized that she’d forgotten to bring antibacterial gel, which was a requirement for Corona Capital relaunch after missing a year because of the coronavirus pandemic.

She got off her bus and saw a Similares, one of the over 8,400 locations that now exist in nearly every municipality in Mexico. The pharmacy, founded in 1997, proliferated throughout the country over Vega's life by offering generic knock-off versions of more well-known brands for up to 75 percent less of the price, operating with the motto "Lo mismo pero mas barato" — "The same but cheaper."

Inside, she saw a single Dr. Simi doll on the pharmacy's shelf and bought it on a whim.

Nearly every Mexican has seen the boistrous Dr. Simi mascot dancing in front of the thousands of Similares pharmacy locations. (Photo: Nathaniel Janowitz for VICE News)

When she arrived at the festival she immediately noticed signs that warned you couldn't enter with dolls and toys: "I hoped that they wouldn't take it from me. So I put it deep down in my backpack and they confiscated a lot of things, but not the doll. I don't know if they didn't see it."

Once inside, Avril saw her favorite artist, Norwegian electro pop singer Aurora, receive a bouquet of flowers and a card from a fan. Others in the crowd began giving her different gifts, a common practice of concert goers in Mexico. Vega decided to try to give her the Dr. Simi doll, but she was too far away to throw it all the way to the stage so she passed it ahead, hoping it would eventually reach Aurora.

The Dr. Simi doll moved fan to fan until eventually getting to Juan Montoya, 25, who arrived at the festival hours early so that he could get a spot near the stage. He was stupefied when he was handed Dr. Simi.

"I didn't know if it was a special gift for Aurora and I didn't know what to do. How could a Dr. Simi be a gift? In all my years going to concerts, I’d never seen a doll like that," Montoya told VICE World News.

Other fans were egging him on about whether to throw the curious gift on stage, he recalled. "I didn't want to keep it, so I just threw it," said Montoya. "And Aurora noticed, she picked it up, and gave it a really sweet hug."

A photo of the exchange blew up on social media the next day.

"Mexicans were going crazy with this unexpected ‘crossover,’" said Montoya. "I never imagined that this would become a new tradition at concerts in Mexico and around the world."

Dr. Simi soon started appearing on stage at other concerts like Coldplay, Maroon 5, and Mac DeMarco. But the trend had its detractors, especially from non-Mexican fans unaware of Dr. Simi and the new trend.

The doll that hit Lady Gaga in Toronto was perhaps the most cringeworthy moment. So-called "little monsters"—as intensely devoted Lady Gaga fans refer to themselves—took to the internet to lambast the star being struck mid-concert.

"How do some fans think this is okay…this is so sad and dangerous," wrote one fan who posted the video on Twitter.

But Javier Jarquín, the editor-in-chief of popular Mexican music magazine Kuadro, disagrees. "In general I think the perception of [the artists] about this phenomenon has been very positive" because "it's like a 100 percent Mexican artifact," he said.

Jarquín mentioned the time Spanish superstar Rosalia asked her fans ahead of a concert in Mexico to bring her Dr. Simi dolls, receiving dozens on stage, and eventually posting photos of herself online with a wide grin surrounded by the stuffed toys.

"The Mexican public is always looking for ways that they can connect with their idols. And Dr. Simi has become just this connection between the public and the artist," Jarquín said.

Jarquín noted how Victor González Torres, who founded Similares, has played a unique role in Mexico's political and social landscape over the years,

The González family is pharmaceutical royalty in Mexico and has been managed by three generations. Robert González Terán founded a generic pharmaceutical producer, Best laboratories, in the mid-1950s. In 1965, his 18-year-old son Victor González Torres joined the family business and eventually became president. In 1997, he founded Similares as a way to make cheap, non-branded medicine directly available to the public, guaranteeing that no product would be sold unless it was at least 30 percent less than its comparable branded competitor.

Within a decade, Similares became Latin America's largest pharmacy chain, with sales in the range of $600 million, and over 3,400 stores, according to a Harvard Business Review case study about the effect that Similares had on the Mexican health system. Mexico went from the country with the most expensive average medicine in Latin America in 1997 to the second cheapest of the six major markets in the region in 2015, ranked least to most expensive as Peru, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Brazil.

Factory workers make Dr. Simi Santa Claus models in December. (Photo: Nathaniel Janowitz for VICE News)

But perhaps it was the creation of Dr. Simi that was the deftest move by Similares. "When the whole world thinks about reforms, I believe that they think about Dr. Simi," said Victor González Herrera, the son of the now-retired Similares founder Victor González Torres and the current president of the umbrella corporation Grupo Por Un País Mejor (Group For a Better Country in English) that controls both Similares pharmacy and Best laboratories.

"Dr. Simi has always been a figure who protects Mexicans," said González Herrera.

Xavier Tello, a Mexican health system analyst, said that Dr. Simi represented "convenience" and that "at the end of the day, he's someone that resolves a problem."

Tello said that along with providing cheap generic medicine to the population, Similares was the first pharmacy in Mexico to provide on-site consultations offering doctor services. The drop-in consultations meant people experiencing the first signs of illness could get a quick diagnosis for just a couple of dollars. The service was available to a vast population in not just cities, but isolated areas of Mexico. In 2022 alone, the pharmacy's doctors gave nearly 137 million consultations, according to Similares.

Numerous other pharmacies popped up imitating the Similares model, while many more expensive brand pharmacies began offering doctor consultations on-site as well.

Initially, many people in Mexico distrusted Similares products, Tello said, but at this point "it's very unreasonable or not very honest to attack Similares for bad quality, because we don't have evidence of that," noting that for years the company has been monitored by the country's health authorities.

The pharmacies, said Tello, have had as big a cultural impact: "There's people that their entire adult life, the only medical service they know is Similares."

In August, the Similares company painted a giant Dr. Simi mural on the outsides of dozens of houses in a neighborhood in the city of Ecatepec, slyly referring to it now as "Simitepec." Dancing Dr. Simi's have become a staple at events in Mexico and are now appearing around the world. Dr. Simi recently spent weeks strutting his stuff at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

Beyond a local market, a massive mural of Dr. Simi's face was painted on an entire neighborhood in Ecatepec, or "Simitepec" as some now call it. (Photo: Nathaniel Janowitz for VICE News)

The company has made a concerted effort not to get involved in the doll-throwing craze, said González Herrera, "because we know that a trend that is more organic, works better."

The pharmacy doesn't make a profit selling the dolls, said González Herrera: "The only thing that we gain, which is invaluable, is the publicity. I don't think it would even be possible to pay Coldplay for advertising like that, they probably wouldn't accept it."

Artists are also spotlighting the factory where the miniature Dr. Simis are created.

An assembly worker sews Dr. Simi's face at the doll factory in Puebla state, where 90 percent of the staff are people with disabilities. (Photo: Nathaniel Janowitz for VICE News)

A company called CINIA designs and manufactures the Dr. Simi dolls since 2007, in outfits including everything from tuxedos, to Santa Claus, to a baseball player holding a bat. But the CINIA factory in Cholula, Puebla, about two hours southeast of Mexico City, is known for employing a work force where 90 percent of its staff are people with some sort of mental or physical disability.

CINIA employs around 440 people, with about a third working on the Dr. Simi dolls. The new trend has caused demand for the dolls to skyrocket, already boosting production from 30,000 a month to 35,000. "At first it was funny," Samantha Henríquez, CINIA's marketing and communications manager said about the trend, but it has created new opportunities. CINIA wants to produce more dolls, and Henríquez estimates the company has hired 10 percent more people over the past year.

The staff at the CINIA factory make dolls of Dr. Simi donning everything from tuxedos to sailor outfits. (Photo: Nathaniel Janowitz for VICE News)

Few were more surprised at the Dr. Simi doll trend than the people producing them day-to-day.

"The first time I saw it, it was something that we didn't expect, or how exciting it would be," Mario Arriola told VICE World News as he sewed closed the back of a Dr. Simi doll on the factory floor.

Arriola, 48, has worked in the factory for 16 years. Before he’d worked at other companies, but they were lacking "laboral inclusion" that "adapted" for his visual and motor disabilities.

Mario Arriola feels "proud" as a Mexican and as a person with disabilities when he sees the Dr. Simi doll being thrown at concerts. (Photo: Nathaniel Janowitz for VICE News)

Since finding permanent employment in CINIA, he's moved into his own apartment, "I got married, I never expected it. I’ve done things that I never imagined before."

Arriola said that the staff feels a sense of pride when they see the doll in the hands of the world's biggest artists "because it represents us as Mexicans."

"We are giving a bit of our heart towards the world, we, as people with disabilities," said Arriola. "Apart from being a Mexican product. It also represents that as people with some sort of disability, we can do many things."

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