About

Don't Judge A Book By It's Cover is a social media game in which people appear to be about to do something strange or outrageous only to stop and say "wait, you thought I was gonna X? Don't judge a book by its cover." The trend is in parody of a video of a young girl who made a video where she made it look like she was going to shave her eyebrows before stopping and saying the line.

Origin

On September 7th, 2017, Twitter user @be_jajaja tweeted a video of herself in which she appears to be about to shave her eyebrows. She stops and reminds the viewer "Don't ever judge a book by its cover." Her tweet gained over 7,800 retweets and 12,500 likes (shown below).

Spread

Her tweet inspired imitators and parodies. The same day, @PLASTISAAC^[1] reposted the original video and started a thread of people doing similar videos. On Septemebr 9th, Instagram user maakekeyscreamx2 uploaded a reposted video of a girl about to cut her hair before saying the line, gaining over 132,000 views (shown below).

As more videos appeared, the trend began attracting media attention. Buzzfeed^[2] covered the trend on September 10th. A thread on /r/OutOfTheLoop^[3] asking about the trend was posted on the 18th. Most of the videos made were done in parody of the original. For example, a post by @reignpath in which he does a meta version of the format gained over 59,000 retweets and nearly 95,000 likes (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable

External References