Hello Kitty fans were shocked to learn that, for half a century, they have had it wrong about the cat-inspired character.

Upon celebrating its 50th anniversary, the creators revealed that the character that became a household brand is not feline at all, but in fact human.

“Hello Kitty is not a cat,” Jill Cook, the director of retail business development at Sanrio, the creators of the iconic cartoon, told Today. “She’s actually a little girl.”

The character was inspired by a small girl who “weighs three apples” and stands five apples tall. She was raised in London, with her twin sister Mimmy, their parents and pet cat.

This is not the first time the topic has come about, but Hello Kitty’s true identity has managed to slip under the general public’s radar until now.

Anthropologist and author Christine R. Yano previously noted in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that “Japanese and Japanese women were into Britain” at the time of Hello Kitty’s conception.

“They loved the idea of Britain. It represented the quintessential idealized childhood, almost like a white picket fence. So, the biography was created exactly for the tastes of that time,” she explained, adding that Hello Kitty is “a little girl.”

Yano pointed out in 2014 that she too was under the impression that Hello Kitty was a feline but was “firmly” corrected by Sanrio while preparing her written texts for the exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum.

“That’s one correction Sanrio made for my script for the show,” she said. “Hello Kitty is not a cat. She’s a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She’s never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature. She does have a pet cat of her own, however, and it’s called Charmmy Kitty.”

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