Kittenfishing

Kittenfishing is presenting the real you with the edges smoothed: photos from a few years back, an inch or two of extra height, a job title rounded up. The person exists, and the profile is the flattering version. That is the difference from catfishing, where the identity itself is fake.

Updated October 5, 2026

Means

A real person behind a flattering profile

First seen

Named by the dating app Hinge in 2017 (press from June 30, 2017); no Merriam-Webster entry; listed on Dictionary.com's slang page

Related terms

Catfishing, Red flags, Green flags, Talking stage, Cookie jarring

Hinge named it in 2017. Researchers had measured the same habit, profile details nudged toward flattering, in a lab by 2008 (Toma et al., 2008).

Signs you are being kittenfished

The signs show up where the profile meets the person, on a video call or across a table.

• The haircut is from another era. Every photo shares a style you never see on your video calls.
• The height does not survive standing up. The profile says six feet. Next to you at the bar, six feet looks like a round number.
• The job is two promotions ahead. The bio says director. The stories are all about their boss.
• “I hardly ever use these apps.” Said by someone who replies within four minutes, at any hour.
• The date opens with an explanation. “I know, my hair was longer in those photos.” The correction arrives before the drinks do.

An old photo is mostly vanity, and most people forgive vanity. Count the adjustments, not their size: a habit of small lies is one of the classic red flags.

Kittenfishing vs catfishing

The difference is how much is false: nothing, some details, or the whole person.

Merriam-Webster defines a catfish as “a person who sets up a false personal profile on a social networking site for fraudulent or deceptive purposes,” and links that sense of the word to the 2010 documentary Catfish (Merriam-Webster, 2026). Kittenfishing keeps the name and lowers the stakes. The person you meet is the one you matched with. The full word, where it comes from and what each sign can and cannot prove, is on catfishing.

Your best angle is presentation. A photo from five years and two haircuts ago is a statement about the present, and the statement is out of date. Whether catfishing itself is a crime, in the US and the UK, is on is catfishing illegal.

Why people kittenfish (and how to stop)

We found no study of the motives, so read these as the usual explanations, not results.

• The photo still feels like you. Few people choose an old picture. They just never replace it.
• Filters move the baseline. When every face in the stack is smoothed, an unfiltered one looks tired.
• Everyone rounds up. If people assume every height is padded by an inch, the honest number reads as an inch shorter.
• Search settings draw hard lines. Height and age filters drop you from results at a fixed number, so the number drifts to whichever side keeps you visible.

To fix a stale profile before a first date does it for you:

1. Add one photo from the last six months. Your face, no filter.
2. Use the number you would say out loud. If you would say “five ten” at the table, the profile says five ten.
3. Put the surprises in the bio. If a fact would surprise someone across the table, such as kids, a move next year or the job you actually have, it belongs in the profile.

Someone who corrects their own record before you notice is a green flag, and the same goes for you.

What to do about it

1. Ask for a short video call before the first date. Five minutes, no pressure: “Quick video call this week before we meet?” It is a normal step in the talking stage, and it settles the photo question before anyone buys a drink.
2. Ask about what matters to you, once. If height, age or the job matters, ask plainly: “How tall are you, actually?” A second time turns a question into a cross-examination.
3. Judge the gap by what it cost you. A two-year-old photo costs a moment of recalibration. A degree they never earned costs you the reason to believe the rest. The number matters less than what it covered.
4. Hold it up against your own lies. If it is one you might have told, let it go. If it is one you would never tell, treat it as information about everything else they said.

What the research says

Toma, Hancock and Ellison brought 80 online daters into a lab, measured their height, weight and age, and compared the results with their profiles (Toma et al., 2008). The deviations were, in the authors’ words, “ubiquitous but small in magnitude.” Shading the facts was common. Shading them a lot was not. Photographs were the least accurate part of the profiles, and relationship information the most accurate.

A second paper from the same 80-person lab sample had judges rate the attractiveness of the 69 daters who agreed to be photographed. The daters rated less attractive were more likely to have enhanced their profile photos and to have overstated height, weight and age, with no such link for income or occupation (Toma & Hancock, 2010). Our reading is that people adjust whatever gets judged at a glance.

The editing goes on after the match. In conversations between mobile dating matches, about 7% of messages were deceptive, and nearly two-thirds of those lies were driven by impression-management goals, mainly self-presentation and availability (Markowitz & Hancock, 2018).

Hinge introduced the term in 2017, and Bustle reported it on June 30, 2017. Hinge said at the time that far more people believed they had been kittenfished than admitted to it, from a survey whose size and method it did not publish (Bustle, 2017). That fits the lab work rather than contradicting it. Few people would call an inch a lie, and a measurement does not ask for an opinion.

NBC News quoted dating coach Jonathan Bennet calling it “catfishing light” on July 19, 2019, and psychologist Sharone Weltfried saying kittenfishers hope to win people over in person (NBC News, 2019). Dictionary.com’s slang page, published January 13, 2021, says “In 2017, the dating app Hinge created the term kittenfishing” (Dictionary.com, 2021). Merriam-Webster has no entry for it.

Both Toma papers rest on one small lab sample of 80 online daters, collected before swipe apps, and the Markowitz study looked at messages, not profiles. We found no study of kittenfishing under that name. What the evidence supports is modest: small enhancements are common, large ones less so, and photos are the least reliable part of a profile.