For 40 years, her face has adorned backpacks and lunch boxes, jewelry and theme restaurants, TV shows and even laptops.
Hello Kitty has long been a staple of Japanese pop culture, but for decades, one expert says, the world has been under a false impression.
Hello Kitty -- despite having a name that's 50 percent devoted to the term that refers to a young cat -- is no feline.
She is, rather, a little girl, the Los Angeles Times reports.
"She's never depicted on all fours," Christine R. Yano, an anthropologist with the University of Hawaii who is curator of a Hello Kitty retrospective at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles in October, told the newspaper. "She is a little girl. She is a friend.
But she is not a cat."
http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2014/08/28/hello-kitty-not-cat-expert-says/