Your Play-Doh Tulip Will Outlive You

A holographic Charizard sits under hard plastic in a case rated, as far as anyone can tell, for minor car accidents. Somebody paid rent-adjacent money for it. It does nothing, and it does nothing flawlessly: it glows orange when the afternoon light hits, then waits, three feet from a laptop where a spreadsheet asks its owner to justify their existence in quarterly increments.Hasbro would like to sell you a version of this feeling. In July, the company released Blooms by Play-Doh, a botanical craft kit aimed at grown-ups with disposable income and unresolved feelings about their childhoods. The box whispers in pastels and a lowercase serif font, with "by Play-Doh" shrunk to a second line, engineered to sit on your kitchen counter without embarrassing you when the plumber arrives. The dough inside stays loud: blue, pink, purple, white, yellow, the full kindergarten register. It is Play-Doh cosplaying as a candle from a boutique in Brooklyn, and it will sell an obscene number of units.We…