About

Jared Leto Hugging Things is a photoshop meme in which people take a photo the actor posted to his Instagram account featuring him hugging a tree and photoshop it so it appears Leto is hugging other things.

Origin

On July 6th, 2014, actor Jared Leto posted a photo to his Instagram account^[1] which featured him hugging a tree with his arms and legs. Within two weeks the photo gained over 190,000 likes and over 4,000 notes.

On July 10th, Leto posted the same photo photoshopped so he was hugging every tree visible captioned with the hashtag #HuggyJ. In less than a week the photo gained over 210,000 likes and more than 7,000 notes.

Spread

Within four days, the hashtag #HuggyJ^[2] was tweeted out more than 12,000 times. Also on July 10th, the hashtag #JaredHugginLeto^[3] was introduced by Twitter user TheHive,^[5] who also introduced a template so users could easily create examples of the meme. Within four days the hashtag was tweeted out over 18,000 times.

Also on that day E! Online^[6] published a post on Leto's original photo and photoshop titled "Can This Photo of Jared Leto Hugging Everything Be the Next Amazing Internet Meme (Please)?!" The following day examples of the memes were included in round-ups published by Refinery29^[7] and InStyle.^[8]

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References