If you've spent your whole life thinking Hello Kitty is a cat, I have some news for you - according to the character's creators... she isn't.
Now, we can see where you'd get the idea that Hello Kitty is a cat - given the name and the fact she has ears and whiskers.
But it's taken until the 50th anniversary of her creation for fans to find out that they've been wrong this whole time.
Jill Cook, the director of retail business development at Sanrio, the creators of the iconic cartoon, revealed to Today: "Hello Kitty is not a cat. She’s actually a little girl."
Wait... what?
As well as the fact that this whiskered feline creature is apparently a little girl, people were bewildered to discover her nationality.
According to Jill, Hello Kitty is a tiny girl who “weighs three apples” and stands five apples tall, that was raised in the suburbs of London with her twin sister Mimmy, their parents, and even her own pet cat, Charmmy Kitty.
Understandably, fans were left utterly confused by the revelation, tweeting: "Not them trying to gaslight us."
Others added: "I have never seen a human being with real life whiskers and cat ears. THAT IS A CAT AND I WONT BE GASLIGHTED LIKE THIS!!!", and: "Is the little girl in the room cause I don’t see her."
Another joked: "If she has ears like a cat, has whiskers like a cat, she is probably just a little girl."
One commented: "lil girls don’t have whiskers but okay lol", while someone else added: "i thought hello kitty was japanese?"
Well, according to anthropologist and author Christine R. Yano, as reported by the Los Angeles Times, at the time Hello Kitty was created “the Japanese and Japanese women were into Britain."
"They loved the idea of Britain. It represented the quintessential idealized childhood, almost like a white picket fence. So, the biography was created exactly for the tastes of that time,” she explained, confirming that Hello Kitty is “a little girl.”
In 2014, on the 40th anniversary of the cartoon, Sanrio "very firmly" corrected Yano in differentiating Hello Kitty's identity as a little girl and the fact that she has all the features of a cat.
“She is a friend. But she is not a cat,” Yano said. “She’s never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature. She does have a pet cat of her own, however, and it’s called Charmmy Kitty.”
Well, that's literally blown my mind.
.jpg_6MtoFj?tr=h-40)
.jpg_6MtoFj?tr=h-184)
