"Blood Orange" She's So Pretentious

Submission 1,010

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About

"Blood Orange" She's So Pretentious refers to a four-panel exploitable meme format based on a confessional from the American reality television show Project Runway in which one participant mocks another over referring to a color as "blood orange" rather than "red" and calls her "pretentious." Spawned by a viral Tumblr post, the meme format has been used online since 2019.

Origin

On October 4th, 2012, episode 12 "In a Place Far, Far Away" of season 10 of the American television series Project Runway premiered.^[1] In the episode, contestant Melissa Fleis talks about her design, referring to the color of the fabric as "blood orange." In a cutaway confessional, contestant Christopher Palu mocks Fleis for saying "blood orange" instead of "red." On October 22nd, 2012, YouTube^[2] user Jason uploaded the clip from the episode, which accumulated over 1.1 million views in 12 years.

It's like that kind of blood orange…
- "Blood orange" – she's so pretentious. Shut up, it's fucking red! "Blood orange."

On September 1st, 2013, Tumblr^[3] user ephemeralse posted four GIFs based on the confessional, with the post accumulating over 1.5 million likes and reblogs on Tumblr in 11 years (a four-panel collage shown below).

Spread

In the following years, a screenshot of the post was widely circulated online, often reposted together with the comment, "this is my favorite post on this whole website." For example, on December 6th, 2019, Redditor yeehawbih reposted the image in the /r/tumblr^[4] subreddit, where it received over 4,200 upvotes in five years.

On May 5th, 2019, Tumblr^[5] user reesespuffofficial posted the earliest discovered meme within the format, a recaption meme mocking a user calling a flan by its French name "Crème caramel." The post (shown below) received over 71,600 reblogs and 77,100 likes in five years as a part of a larger thread.

In 2019 and 2020, the format saw viral spread on Tumblr, where multiple memes based on it went viral during that period. For example, on May 19th, 2020, Tumblr^[6] user mythoflight used a version of the format to mock a tweet presenting a joke referencing a popular Vine as an "example of referential millennial dadaism." The post (shown below) received over 100,000 reblogs and 111,000 likes on Tumblr in four years.

The format maintained moderate popularity on Tumblr and Reddit through the early 2020s.