Everyone in China Is Wearing Plastic Plants on Their Heads and Nobody Knows Why

Folks in China are trying to figure out the origins of a new trend that has all the cool kids affixing plastic plants to their heads. According to the New York Times, clipping plastic bean sprouts, flowers, gourds or any other kind of vegetation to your crown is what’s hot in the streets. The only problem? It seems like no one in all of China, a country with more than a billion people, knows where the trend came from.

Hip college students and grown folks alike are scratching their clover-laden heads wondering who got the idea to walk around with Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden sprouting from their tresses. “I think this comes more from Western culture,” one student told the Times. “It’s fun, but I guess it’s also about protecting the environment, to show that you care about nature,” a peddler of the green headgear offered (which is interesting considering the country is one of the biggest polluters of out planet).

But probably the best explanation came from a 24-year-old medical student, who best sums up how the trend caught on: “When I first saw them, I thought, ‘that’s strange,’ but everyone was wearing them… I thought it was fun and entertaining, so I also put one on, too.”

Sometimes, the explanation is as simple as that.