Demi Lovato celebrated her 31st birthday with a very special guest. On August 21, the Grammy nominee shared a TikTok video showing off three birthday cakes she received in honor of the big day, including a batch emblazoned with her infamous Poot Lovato meme cupcakes. "Free POOT," she joked in the caption, more than eight years after the viral meme was first created.
In the video, Lovato (who now uses both "she/her" and "they/them" pronouns) introduces each cake one by one, leading up to the main event. "I just wanted to show you my cake, and this one is so beautiful," she said of a sparkling light blue cake decorated with pearls and "31" written in frosting. "This is so cute," she said, describing a rainbow cookie cake that read "Happy Birthday Demi." "This one is so bad!" she concluded, showing off her handiwork and laughing in the background.
"Poot," which debuted on Tumblr in 2015, is a heavily Photoshopped photo of Lovato on the red carpet at the 2014 Royal Variety Performance, which made the singer's face look bloated and distorted. After the photo was depicted as parody fan art, it was retweeted by another Tumblr account that crafted an elaborate backstory of "Demi's twin sister" Putt. "She spent her whole life locked in a basement," the caption read. "This photo was taken when she first went out. Her name is Poot." The post quickly went viral, with social media echoing the joke and launching the "Free Poot" campaign .
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Naturally, Twitter was a big fan of Putt's birthday resurrection and celebrated Lovato's happy embrace with the meme.
Lovato wasn't always enthusiastic about the meme, criticizing how quickly it spread on Twitter in 2015. "So cool to see a bad angle turned into a meme spread all over the internet for people's entertainment," she wrote before deleting the tweet. She eventually changed her tune, posting a GIF of Putt in 2017 and joking that "Putt was locked up" because "she's allergic to the sun."
In a recent interview with Harper's Bazaar , Lovato explained that she was initially hurt by the meme because she didn't realize it was heavily edited. "When Putt went viral, that was really bad because I thought it was a real photo of me and I was like 'Oh no, that's a really bad angle,'" she explained in 2022. "But Put was Photoshopped. Afterwards, I felt better because I realized it wasn't my face, but when it went viral, it was really weird. It's really funny looking back on it now."
