The Legs

About

The Legs refers to a photograph of a woman’s legs with white paint streaked across them, creating an optical illusion of a shiny, reflective surface. The picture sparked an online debate over whether the legs were oily or covered in white paint, similar to the viral #TheDress photograph.

Origin

On September 15th, 2016, Instagram^[1] user leonardhoespams posted a photograph of her legs with the caption “i like the feeling of paint on my skin” (shown below). Within five weeks, the post gained over 540 likes and 160 comments.

Spread

On October 23rd, 2016, @leonardhoespams^[1] reposted the photograph with the caption “this is my fucking legs” and asking people to stop posting it to “meme pages” without crediting her (shown below).

On October 25th, Twitter user @kingkayden tweeted the legs photo, asking “are these legs shiny and oily or are they legs with white paint on them” (shown below). Within 24 hours, the tweet gained over 8,500 likes and 7,200 retweets.

That day, many Twitter users began commenting about the ambiguous photograph (shown below). In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the viral photograph, including The Daily Dot,^[2] BuzzFeed,^[3] Mashable,^[4] The Sun^[5] and NewStatesman.^[6]

Search Interest

External References