The Story Behind The Bizarre 'Finger Hand Movement'

We first started taking notice of people waving weird little doll hands on their fingers when we went to the HARD Summer music festival last weekend. At first, we thought it was some new raver trend, but quickly found out there's a whole movement dedicated to it called the "Finger Hand Movement"—and it's slowly spreading everywhere.

If you go to the Finger Hand Movement Instagram page, you'll find snapshots of people donning these creepy little hands and doing a variety of things with them. Fans will high-five each other with these doll hands, cover their bare breasts with them (akin to that sexy Janet Jackson album cover), and even pose with them in travel photos all the way from the Eiffel Tower in Paris to Machu Picchu in Peru. Even celebs like Jack Black, Weird Al' Yankovic, Wacka Flacka Flame and Skrillex have been seen with them.

San Francisco-based Dean Tye, 28, started this Finger Hand Movement with his two friends from Los Angeles, Mackenzie Stith and Claire Sprock. He runs the group's Facebook and Instagram page, and explained to LAist what the whole thing is all about. "As for what the Movement is itself, at its core, it's a way for people to express themselves using the Finger Hands as their canvas," he tells LAist. "The Movement can be artistic (lots of people have tattooed and painted them), it can be goofy and silly, it can even be a bit sexual, but in the end it's all about having fun in a simple way."

Tye says they don't have any hidden agenda behind the Finger Hand Movement. He first ran across the finger hands last October when he was scrolling through This Is Why I'm Broke, a website that features weird and ridiculous things to buy on the Internet. It led him to to the Archie McPhee website, which sells the hands. (If you're curious, they cost $4.95 for a set of five.) Tye says that although Archie McPhee is not affiliated with the Finger Hand Movement, they fully support it. (We imagine they'd support it since these finger hands couldn't have been a top-seller at Archie McPhee until this Finger Hand Movement rolled around...right?)

Tye and his friends started playing around with the finger hands, and began using the #FingerHandMovement hashtag on social media earlier this year. It started taking off. And because Tye goes to a lot of music festivals and concerts, and Stith and Sprock are deep in the electronic music community, we're seeing a lot of them show up at raves. That also explains why the likes of Skrillex and Fat Boy Slim are caught with them, too.

Here's an amusing video of folks dancing with the hands at HARD Summer:

While Tye says he's even seen a grandmother use the finger hands on her 89th birthday, it's mostly a millennial thing.

"I'm constantly amazed that this little toy I wanted to buy to mess with my friends has turned into this thing that has helped connect so many people, but I've legit been told about people who have met their new best friends because they were both wearing one at a show," Tye says.

We may not get what's going on with the youth these days ("Get off my lawn!"), but hey, at least you'll know why there are creepy little doll hands scattered on the grounds of music festivals, and not freak out that a serial killer is on the loose.