Demi Lovato originally thought photoshopped Poot Lovato meme was a real picture of herself

Demi Lovato has revealed that she originally believed the viral Poot Lovato meme was a real photo of her and only found out that it had been edited ‘later’ on.

The 30-year-old singer, who recently announced that she was using she/her pronouns as well as they/them, admitted that she had no clue the image had been doctored and simply believed it was a real shot of her taken at a bad angle.

For those unfamiliar with the Poot Lovato meme, it began when a photo of Lovato was taken on the red carpet of the 2014 Royal Variety Performance at the Palladium Theater - but the original image was then edited to make Lovato’s face appear wider and her hairline pulled further back.

A year or so later, the edited image was shared on Tumblr where ‘Poot’ was officially born. In a post, sharing the image, a Tumblr user wrote: "Demi’s twin sister. She was locked in a basement her whole life. This picture was taken the first time she went outside. Her name is Poot." From their the image spread like wildfire across Tumblr before making its way to Twitter, with one person even creating a @OfficialPoot account where they tweeted as ‘Poot’.

But while fans of Lovato may have got a laugh out of the meme, it seems that the singer herself was less than impressed.

Speaking in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, she said: “When Poot went viral, that actually sucked because I thought that was a real picture of me.

“And I was like, ‘oh no, that's a really bad angle’. But Poot was photoshopped. Later I felt better about it because I realized that wasn't my face. But it was definitely weird when it went viral.”

Despite initially thinking it ‘sucked’, Lovato said it was ‘really funny to look back on’.

Lovato was seemingly so taken in by the fake photo that she tweeted about it back in October 2015.

"Cool to see a s***ty angle turn into a meme that circulates the Internet to people's amusement ha,” she wrote in a since deleted tweet.

She followed up the post with a second that added: “Oh and makes actual 'headlines.'"

But it seems that by 2017, she’d embraced the meme and managed to see the funny side, as she shared a gif of it without a caption that soon racked up almost 100,000 likes.