She is described as being a female domestic shorthair which is grey and tabby. The original comic strip series comprised characters modeled after Belton, Duff, their puppy named Care, and Pusheen, a chubby grey tabby cat based on Belton’s cat that now lives with her parents in Oregon. Pusheen’s name stems from the word “puisín,” which means kitten in Irish. She is seen with her sister, Stormy. Sometimes she and her sister are attracted to various themes, such as Pusheenasarus Rex, where Pusheen is a dinosaur and Stormy is in a dinosaur egg.

Pusheen first appeared in May 2010 “Pusheen Things” on Claire Belton and Andrew Duff’s site, Everyday Cute. In 2011, Belton and Duff launched a spin-off website dedicated to Pusheen.

This character has become well known for appearing in decal sets On Facebook, which are pictures that can be attached to messages or comments. The feature, including a set of stickers, was introduced to Android in April 2013, also added to the main website in July of the same year. In a post for PC Magazine on emoji and Unicode, Sascha Segan referred to Pusheen as Facebook’s “proprietary emoji”, being used as a form of vendor lock-in.