People are only just discovering that Hello Kitty isn’t actually a cat

You’d have thought it would be fairly safe to assume that Hello Kitty is – as the name suggests – a cat, right?

Wrong. And no... she’s not a lion, a tiger, a cheetah or any other kind of big cat either.

People are saying they no longer know ‘what to believe anymore’ after the revelation dropped during a recent Saturday Night Live sketch.

The popular Sanrio character was the subject of a new Saturday Night Live sketch last weekend, which saw Hello Kitty store managers struggling to train their new batch of employees.

Alamy Richard Watkins / Alamy

"If you open to page five of your employee handbooks, you'll see a list of facts about Hello Kitty," one of the managers says in the clip, which features Cecily Strong, Molly Kearney, Keke Palmer, Bowen Yang, Sarah Sherman and Marcello Hernández.

"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."

At first, many viewers assumed the skit was just a joke, but it turns out that that it was very much rooted in truth, as confirmed by Sanrio, the company behind the franchise.

One of the trainees 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’.

NBC

Commenting on Twitter, one user wrote: “The fact that these Hello Kitty facts are real.”

Another replied: “Wait what????”

Someone else also 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.”

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.”