Why Are Fortune Cookies Telling You to Shave Your Pubes?

"Life is like a bush," read the fortune accompanying my Chinese food delivery. "Sometimes it needs a little trim to see the path clearly."

The bush-trimming innuendo initially seemed unintentional — a silly oversight by the clairvoyant force that surely hand-writes each fortune cookie message specifically for me to enjoy between bites of fried rice and spicy edamame. But what was on the back of the fortune shattered this illusion: a tiny photo of an electric shaver next to the logo of men's grooming company Manscaped.

Ads for pubic hair trimmers have replaced the usual predictions and aphorisms found in fortune cookies in thousands of Chinese restaurants throughout the country, including several in Denver.

Chinatown Bistro in North Capitol Hill, John Holly's Asian Bistro on South Downing Street and JJ Bistro in the Union Station neighborhood are all dishing out Manscaped ads with their meals. But it isn't a conscious decision made by individual restaurants — they get their fortune cookies from distributors, who get them from OpenFortune.

OpenFortune dispensed 500,000 Manscaped ads in fortune cookies nationwide in just two months, according to its website, using ChatGPT to generate the ad-specific faux fortunes. The New York-based company claims to reach a network of 47,000 restaurants across 99 percent of zip codes in the United States, though it didn't respond to inquiries about its Denver partnerships.

The company doesn't only deal in personal grooming; it runs fortune cookie ads for clients like Rocket Money ("You will soon be on your way to achieving your financial goals"), Cars.com ("You have the ability to steer your own destiny") and Dude Wipes flushable toilet wipes ("This too shall pass").

But with fortunes like "A trimmed bush makes the deck look bigger" and "A smooth ride is always more enjoyable," the Manscaped ad campaign has made a particularly big splash on social media.
OpenFortune boasts 18 million social media impressions related to the Manscaped fortunes, alleging that 12 percent of customers share photos of their fortunes online. However, while the company celebrates this as an achievement of the "world's craftiest Trojan horse in advertising," not all the attention is positive.

One TikTok video about the Manscaped fortunes garnered 638,000 views, but most of the comments are critical, describing the ad campaign as a "capitalistic horror."

"It's like we're not even allowed to exist anymore without needing to buy something," one commenter wrote. "If I open a fortune cookie and get an advertisement I'm never eating there again," another added.

These sentiments extend to posts on X, with many users describing fortune cookie ads as ruining "the last vestige of humanity in the cold, bleak world" and causing the death of wonder in America. A few were furious over their children being subjected to sexual jokes during family dinner, and others questioned why anyone would want to think about pubes while eating Chinese food.

Though fortune cookies are largely a meaningless Americanized custom, they also provide a small moment of joy for diners, and are a near-sacred tradition for families like mine who end dinners by going in a circle to read each person's fortune aloud.

Denverites can still find regular fortune cookies at numerous Chinese restaurants throughout the city, including Little Gingko Asian Cafe, Taste of China, Wokano Asian Bistro, Pepper Asian Bistro II and Great Wall — to name a few spots that were tested for this article.

My fortune from Great Wall epitomized the choice to provide traditional fortune cookies for customers, prioritizing a bit of fun and levity over ad revenue from a ball trimmer company: "Don't get so caught up in the daily grind that you never find any time to enjoy yourself."

But my fortune from Little Gingko said, "You will never need to worry about a steady income," so what do they know?