About

Punklight Sparkle refers to an unusual hairstyle worn briefly by the character Twilight Sparkle from the Hasbro animated series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Its appearance spawned a variety of tributes, including a large volume of fan art.

Origin

The hairstyle is featured in episode 3 of season 5 of the Friendship is Magic series, "Castle Sweet Castle", premiered April 11th, 2015.^[1] Twilight Sparkle appears wearing it briefly during a scene in a bathhouse (shown below).

The first still image of the scene to be uploaded to MLP image hosting site Derpibooru (below, left) was submitted April 11th, by user jspenguin.^[4] Other images from the scene were uploaded on the same day.^[5][6]

Spread

The hairstyle features heavily on Derpibooru, with 378 images as of January 2016.^[2] Around 150 were uploaded in the week after the airing of the episode. The current top-rated image (shown below), with 995 upvotes, was uploaded January 5th, 2016.^[7] Searching for "Punklight" on DeviantArt returns 55 results.^[3]

Variations of the meme include crossovers with other franchises (below, left) and recreations using different media such as 3D and plushies (below, right).

The meme has also seen use as an exploitable, as demonstrated by DeviantArt user blah23z's^[8] vectors featuring the rest of the Mane Six.

Various Examples

External References