By Swetha Anil Kumar
The recent “Hug My Younger Self” trend, which uses Google Gemini’s new image editing Nano Banana feature, has gone viral on social media platforms and made users nostalgic with various celebrities and influencers following the trend. This artificial intelligence (AI) model is being used by people to create real-looking, adorable, polaroid-style images of the present self hugging their younger self. This trend has allowed users to reimagine themselves in a heartwarming moment and become nostalgic about their childhood.
Celebrities like Alia Bhatt have praised this trend, saying ‘Sometimes we just have to hug our inner 8-year-old’, while reposting an image of her current self embracing her younger version, captioned “the younger one would be so proud today,” posted by a fan page.
The latest image editing tool, Nano Banana, by Google Gemini, is a feature by Google DeepMind. Gemini 2.5 Flash Image is another name given to this tool. To join the trend, users can download the Google Gemini app from the Play Store or App Store and sign in, and to make the polaroid, add one picture from your childhood and another of your recent pictures, and then type “click a cute polaroid picture of my older self hugging my younger self”. Users can try adding more details to the prompt if the result is not what they had expected.
The Nano Banana model will allow you to freely edit 100 images per day, and for users who have the Gemini AI Pro or are Ultra subscribers, the limit goes up to 1,000.
With the release of Google Gemini’s Nano Banana AI feature, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has surpassed Google Gemini’s global app rankings to become the top-ranked app on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
Removing the need for complex editing software, Nano Banana was designed to help users edit images with simple text prompts, explained David Sharon, Gemini Apps’ Multimodal Generation Lead. India is one of the top countries using the Gemini Nano Banana feature, as reported by Google on 12 September 2025, and has emerged as one of its biggest user bases with about 500M images edited, 23M new users, and viral trends like Hug My Younger Self and AI Figurine.