About

Cat Beards is a photo fad that involves positioning a cat in front of one's face in such a manner that the feline's furry chin appears as if it is part of the model's facial hair.

Origin

The earliest known example of a "cat beard" photo was uploaded by Tumblr user Catasters on July 28th, 2011, depicting a man touching noses with his tabby cat (shown below). Two days later, Catasters' image was submitted to the /r/pics subreddit, receiving nearly a thousand up votes. In the following days, the same image was featured on a number of internet humor blogs, including Neatorama^[3], Tastefully Offensive^[4], Buzzfeed^[5], and the Huffington Post^[6].

Spread

In early 2012, the fad began to gain some visible momentum on Tumblr] with the creation of the single topic blog cat-beard.com^[7] in March and a feature post on the Huffington Post UK^[8] on May 1st. Throughout May 2012, the "cat bearding" phenomenon was covered by TheFW^[9], Flotsam and Catsam^[10], the Daily Dawdle^[11], and TheySmell.^[12] On May 16th, 2013, Tumblr user Captain Awesome Sauce^[14] posted a photo set of five "cat beard" images, which gained more than 50,000 notes in the first 24 hours.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References