People only just realising Hello Kitty isn’t a cat

Hello Kitty is pretty much a pop culture icon, but despite her name, she's not even a cat.

Okay, so you might be wondering how on Earth Hello Kitty is not a cat?

She has whiskers, hears and nose in the right placement. She's called Kitty!

Sadly, it appears it's all been a lie, which was revealed by none other than a Saturday Night Live comedy sketch. The video shows Hello Kitty store members trying to train a new staff member, when things take a strange turn.

Cecily Strong, Molly Kearney, Keke Palmer, Bowen Yang, Sarah Sherman, and Marcello Hernández take the lead on the sketch, and the revelation about Hello Kitty is even funnier when you see the reaction of the actors.

Hello Kitty is NOT a cat (Getty Stock Images)

"If you open to page five of your employee handbooks, you'll see a list of facts about Hello Kitty," a store manager says.

"As you can see, she loves to bake cookies, she goes to school, and she's not a cat, she's a human little girl."

I'm sorry. She's a what?

One of the trainees then says in confusion: "No... why did you say Hello Kitty was a human little girl."

The manager replies: “Well, because it’s true! According to the creators, Hello Kitty is a human little girl.

“[…] These are just the official Sanrio facts about Hello Kitty.”

The managers go on to offer up some other facts, including that Hello Kitty is in third grade and lives in London.

She also has a boyfriend called Dear Daniel and that, unlike Hello Kitty, ‘he actually is a cat’.

At first, many viewers assumed the skit was just a joke, but it turns out that it was very much rooted in truth, as confirmed by Hello Kitty's creator company, Sanrio - and it's left people seriously confused.

Commenting on X, one user wrote: “The fact that these Hello Kitty facts are real,” while another replied: “Wait what????”

Someone else commented: “I wonder how many people googled ‘is Hello Kitty supposed to be a human’ after this skit.”

To which one other responded: “I definitely did, and now I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

Hello Kitty is a child (Paul Hawthorne/Getty Images)

Anthropologist Christine R. Yano previously revealed how she got called out by Sanrio when preparing her Hello Kitty exhibition at the Japanese American National Museum, having mistakenly believed – like many of us – that the subject of her display was a cat.

Yano, from the University of Hawaii, told the Los Angeles Times in 2014: “That’s one correction Sanrio made for my script for the show.

"Hello Kitty is not a cat. She’s a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat.

“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.”

The more you know.