Why Lumo the Eurovision mascot is creeping some (but not all) people out

A cuteness conundrum and a scientific explanation

As someone with a professional interest in anthropomorphism, cuteness studies, and Eurovision, I was delighted to see the reveal of the Eurovision 2025 mascot last week. But this mascot, a gender-neutral heart-shaped biped name Lumo meant to be the “living symbol of the magic of music,” was not universally celebrated. The Guardian columnist Stuart Heritage described Lumo as “terrifying” and “the love child of Mick Hucknall and Crazy Frog.” Heritage singled out the “bizarrely sexy mouth” as one of the main features rendering Lumo creepy instead of cute. To be honest, I had a similar response to Lumo. But many others, including the judges who chose Lumo as the Eurovision mascot from a pool of 36 submitted designs, did not find Lumo creepy. That’s because while cuteness is a universal human cognitive response, creepiness is not.

To explain what’s going on, let’s first have a look at Lumo:

Lumo was designed by Lynn Brunner, a graphic design student at the Basel Academy of Art and Design.

Lumo ticks a few boxes when it comes to cuteness, most obviously the over-sized eyes. Humans tend to find things cute if they have facial (or other morphological or behavioral) features that remind us of human babies. In the case of faces—whether that’s the faces of other humans, animals, or cartoons—there are mathematical properties of the features of the face that render something cute vs. not-so-cute, including the relative size of the nose, mouth, and forehead. Compared to adults, human babies have relatively smaller noses, smaller mouths, rounder faces, larger eyes, and longer foreheads. It’s these features that generate that cuteness response in our brains, and this response is universal for our species.

From an evolutionary perspective the cuteness response is easy to explain: if we didn’t feel intensely driven to care for our babies, our species would’ve died out. On paper, babies are weird little blobs of nonsense that most humans should not want to touch with a 10-foot pole: they are a nightmare of loud noises, stinky smells, and an endless stream of worry and labor just to keep them alive. It’s their cuteness—programmed into the morphology of those adorable faces—that kickstarts our parental instincts and obliges us to care for them. There is evidence that other species (including our fellow primates) respond to baby-like facial features in ways that suggests they too are attracted to cuteness, generating a similar pull to treat cute things with more affection and kindness.

But not everyone finds Lumo cute. And the primary culprit is those lips. They do not conform to the cuteness math that we’ve been talking about. Lumo’s mouth is not the cute little button-mouth we associate with babies. It is, in fact, oddly adult-like in its size and fullness. But more importantly, it is rendered in a a more realistic design style than the rest of the character; looking more life-like than the rest. It’s reminiscent of the first version of Sonic the Hedgehog that was revealed back in 2019, causing such a colossal online backlash that the character went through a full re-design to make it less human-like in appearance for the final edit of the film:

From TMZ

The Sonic version on the left had a mouth and teeth that were too human-like, and thus a strange contrast to his otherwise cartoonish face/body, causing some people to feel creeped out. Also, his eyes were too small, nerfing some of the cuteness that we see in the big-eyed redesigned version.

We’re dealing here with the problem of creepiness, or the uncanny valley (that is, an unpleasant feeling that crops up when we see something that is a strange mix of too-human and not-human-enough). Lumo’s lips are right smack in this uncanny-valley, which is why Stuart Heritage had such a visceral response to the character, calling them “oddly full lips you really only see on homemade pornography fan-art forums.”

But unlike cuteness, not every person reacts the same way to so-called creepy or uncanny valley features. Some people have no problem with Lumo’s full lips. They don’t generate an unpleasant response at all. There is a fair amount of research into the precise triggers of the uncanny valley, with evidence to show that our susceptibility to this phenomenon is different per individual, dictated by the culture we find ourselves in, and mitigated by our repeated exposure to things that might otherwise trigger an uncanny valley response. So there are plenty of people who, unlike me and Stuart Heritage, are going to be super excited to see life-sized versions of a full-lipped Lumo walking around Basel during the 2025 Eurovision celebrations.

I have taken the liberty of creating a Photoshopped version of Lumo with the mouth transformed into a smaller, cuter mouth. Have a look at this and see if you find it cuter (or less creepy) than the original:

I don’t find this version nearly as unpleasant to look at. But, and this is the main thrust of my little essay, that’s not the case for everyone. There are millions of people who would prefer the full-mouth version. And that’s just fine. Eurovision is about uniting people from around the globe through their love of music (and spectacle and camp and silliness). And learning to accept and celebrate our differences—even our idiosyncratic cognitive responses to the uncanny valley—is all part of the mission of Eurovision. So, thank you Lumo? I guess.