On the Origin of Peaches
The emergence of peach-creatures as folk art has no definite explanation. Though representations of the fruit gained popularity as a sexual metonymy in the days of the digital Internet, they did not acquire their iconic human-like form until much later, and emoji theorists discount any philological connection between the two.
It is more likely that public interest began to focus on peaches during early test phases of the nanostimulation industry. In particular, the taste sensation of eating one was among the first to be reproduced in a human subject while under nano-assisted autohypnosis. It became common to post spherecaptures of oneself biting into a peach in one of the standard environments, once the technology became mainstream. Decorating peaches became a hobby amongst early adopters, or people who remained connected for a long time and eventually became bored of simulated eating.
A counter-theory is that the popularity of peaches was driven by the popularity of Mongolian pop singer y-child, who, as a marketing stunt, released her third single in a particularly novel format: the pits of genetically modified peaches. The pits were playable on any phone that had a high-resolution 3D camera, albeit if one’s hands were steady enough and the fruit sufficiently eaten. The single was heard more often in videos of people attempting to operate the pit-scanner than by anyone listening as intended. But the result did put more images of peaches into the public consciousness than any other viral social phenomenon up to that time.