About

Lookin' Like a Snack is a slang term used online to refer to one being very attractive. After being used on Black Twitter for several years since the late 2000s and early 2010s, it began seeing widespread use in 2017.

Origin

The earliest known use of the phrase to mean attractive appeared on Twitter on July 6th, 2009 by Twitter user @BeautyMark_Tee^[1] (shown below).

Spread

The phrase saw use online over the next several years, particularly in Black Twitter, in captions to selfies or comments on others' pictures. For example, On December 20th, 2015, Twitter user @Neff1017^[2] posted a selfie with the caption, gaining 23 likes (shown below, left). Twitter user @xocatilina_^[3] did the same on December 11th, 2015, gaining a retweet and eleven likes (shown below, right).

On May 30th, 2016, Urban Dictionary user Senpaijosh submitted a definition^[4] for the term that reads "Basically saying that person looks so good you can eat them all up." The definition gained 317 upvotes (shown below).

The phrase began seeing more widespread use in meme contexts in the beginning of 2017. On March 13th, 2017, Twitter user @QUEbaGoodingJr uploaded a picture of a hippo biting another hippo's butt with the caption "When bae get out the shower looking like a snack."^[5] The tweet gained 5,800 retweets and 6,900 likes (shown below).

Over the course of the following few months, the phrase would be used in its original context and with joke variations on Twitter. Some popular examples of the latter include a tweet by @sexingthots^[6] which featured a rainbow-colored confederate flag, posted November 9th, 2017 and gaining over 110 retweets (shown below, left), and a tweet by @ConnorKennedyy^[7] that used a picture of Squidward posted November 2nd, 2017 (shown below, right)

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References