What is ahegao, the hentai trend popularised by Belle Delphine?

The internet loves a gamer girl, apparently, and the queen of them at the moment appears to be Belle Delphine. The cosplayer hit headlines after promising to stroke ‘two cocks’ on Pornbub if she reached a certain follower count, and releasing a video of her with a pair of roosters once she’d done so, as well as other hilarious bait and switch titles. Then, she started selling her ‘gamer girl bath water’ for $30 (£24) a pop, selling 500 tubs in the space of two days. Incredible. Before these stunts, however, the 19-year-old was known as an ‘ahegao girl’, and the trend for the funny faces has been growing online off of the back of her fame. The term relates to Japanese anime and manga porn style known as hentai (which loosely translates to pervert).

Ahegao was first cited around the 1990s, and describes the facial expressions of the characters in these hentai porn films as they reach orgasm. In hentai pornography, women are often shown with their eyes rolling back, tongue hanging out, and blushing or panting. The idea appears to be to show an intense level of arousal, where someone loses their faculties completely.