Celebrity
Paris Hilton Didn’t Invent Her “That’s Hot” Catchphrase — This Person Did
In her new memoir Paris, she revealed her little sister actually coined her signature saying.
Paris Hilton’s new book tells all of the stories fans have been yearning to hear more about, including the origins of her iconic sayings. In her new memoir Paris, published on March 14, the 42-year-old mother told the story of how her signature catchphrase “that’s hot” came to be — and she didn’t come up with it herself. It turns out her little sister Nicky Hilton is actually the person responsible for coining the phrase that’s now become pop culture canon.
Hilton explained that in middle school, she kept a “ornately BeDazzled” diary to keep track of everything in her life. “I recorded all the middle school cheerleader drama and page upon page of ideas for inventions, thoughts about life, poems, dreams, doodles, tirades against anyone who hurt my feelings, odes to whatever boy I was crushing on, and lavishly illustrated stream-of-consciousness stories about wild horses, unicorns, and animal kingdoms,” she wrote.
When she heard her sister say “that’s hot,” it became a new mantra for her, so she put it in her diary and doodled “flowers and fireworks around it” so it would stick. For Hilton, “that’s hot” had a deeper meaning, calling it “a little positive affirmation” and “unpretentious” in its reassurance. “It’s like ‘I see you’ — but hotter,” she said.
It quickly became her go-to. “Suddenly there seemed to be a lot of things in my world that deserved this little accolade, and I recorded them faithfully in my diary,” she wrote. “Mom got me markers with glitter in them. That’s hot. We learned how to diagram sentences. That’s hot. Nicole [Richie] is sleeping over the whole weekend. That’s hot.” However, middle school Hilton couldn’t predict just how much people would love saying “that’s hot” even before she popularized it. “Pretty soon all the kids in my class were saying, ‘That’s hot,’” she wrote. “Like I made ‘fetch’ happen!”
When she started becoming a public figure on her own accord in 2004, Hilton had the smarts to trademark “that’s hot” and use it across her own empire. She even sued Hallmark for $100,000 when they used it on a greeting card in 2007 — and won the case. That’s hot.
