Anybody surfing the internet these past few weeks has likely come across the latest social media trend: the “She’s / he’s a 10” meme.
The trend, which originated on TikTok in May, begins with a person rating an imaginary lover on a scale from 1 to 10 based on their attractiveness, before presenting a negative or positive trait that might affect their score.
In a tweet that has garnered more than 35,000 likes, one person wrote: “He’s a 10 but follows girls that do not follow him back.” On the flip side, another person whose tweet gained more than 150,000 likes wrote: “she’s a 10 but she bites the skin off her lips when she’s anxious.”
Others simply made jokes about the meme’s format itself. “‘She’s a 10 but’ is the premise of most Seinfeld episodes,” one user wrote in a tweet that amassed over 115,000 likes and 9,000 retweets.
The trend is just the latest meme to be born out of TikTok. It gained further traction on Twitter after several tweets went viral on June 18, according to the meme database Know Your Meme.
And while the meme is not particularly notable in its virality, Phillip Hamilton, a Know Your Meme editor who created the website’s “She’s / he’s a 10” page, explained that the meme’s setup lends itself to “countless possibilities.”
“There’s so many scenarios you could come up with and slap it onto the end of the ‘She’s or he’s a 10’ trend,” Hamilton said. “That’s the core of any popular meme – it’s about how malleable it is and how much you can flex it and change the joke around it.”
On TikTok, the trend mostly appears as a game between two or more people who come up with different scenarios. But on Twitter, the meme takes on a majority text-based framework that is particularly conducive to viral tweets.
“These scenarios alone are funny enough to sort of thrive on their own – whether you play the game or not,” he said.
Hamilton said he prefers TikTok over Twitter because the videos better emphasize the “game aspect” of the trend.
“It’s funny to watch people rattle off these scenarios over and over, and hear the responses of other people in real-time,” he said.
But regardless of its format, Hamilton added that there was a reason why the viral “she’s / he’s a 10” trend joins the ranks of other popular memes: “It’s funny, but it’s also revealing something real.”