Happy Heart Hugs Day falls on 28 June every year, and it was invented by a French bulldog — or rather by the people who wrote in his voice. Archie Brindleton announced it on his own website in June 2016, and the date marks his homecoming three years before that. The detail most write-ups drop: it is a day for the people you cannot hug, not the ones you can.

What Happy Heart Hugs Day actually asks you to do

Happy Heart Hugs Day is an unofficial observance held on 28 June, and its premise is narrower than the name suggests. A happy heart hug is not a hug. It is a message sent to someone who fills your heart with happiness but is too far away to be hugged in person. The founder said so plainly at the outset, and it is the detail almost every secondary account drops when it converts the day into a general instruction to go and embrace people.

That distinction decides what the day is for. Observances built around physical affection already exist and have their own dates. This one was made for the gap between them: the friend who moved abroad, the grandparent three time zones away, the person you think about often and contact rarely. Nothing about it requires you to be in the same room as anybody, which is the point, and which makes it one of the easier days in the calendar to observe properly.

Where the day came from, and which year is which

There are two years in this story and they are routinely collapsed into one. The first is 2013. On 28 June that year a French bulldog named Archie Brindleton moved in with the owners he addressed as Mum and Pop and, in the site’s own account, was covered in gigantical piles of happy heart hugs. That homecoming is what the date commemorates. It is not the year the observance started.

The second is 2016. On 22 June that year Archie’s site announced the day — he had decided, he wrote, to start a sooperspecial holidaytimes — and asked readers what its traditions ought to be. The first observance followed six days later, on Tuesday 28 June 2016, listed on the site’s own events calendar and marked with a set of photographs. The announcement was cross-posted to Facebook, which is where the day found most of its early audience.

Archie was a real dog rather than a rhetorical device. He was a French bulldog from London, Ontario, with a following in the tens of thousands, and in February 2016 his owners took him to Huntington, West Virginia to film a fundraiser for James Rice, a man who needed a kidney transplant — a happy heart hug, as they described it, delivered in person. Archibald Flubberford Brindleton died on 22 November 2023. The site is still standing, and the day has outlasted him on calendars that mostly never mention he existed.

The one instruction the founder actually gave

Most invented observances tell you to celebrate and leave you to work out how. This one arrived with a method, published in 2016 and never revised. Write to the person. Tell them, in words, how they make you feel — not that you are thinking of them, but what they do to your mood when you think of them. Then close with the day’s sign-off, three H’s separated by purple hearts: H💜H💜H💜.

That is the whole ritual, and its plainness is why it survives. The public version collects under the hashtag #HappyHeartHugsDay; the private version is a text message, a letter, a voice note or a card that names something specific about the person receiving it. The tone the calendar listings recommend is silly, soppy and sweet — glitter, heart stickers and hug coupons rather than anything solemn — though none of that is compulsory, and the sign-off is the only element anyone ever prescribed.

What the research on hugging does and does not say

The health claims attached to hugging are real, but they are claims about physical touch, which this day pointedly is not. The best known is the work of Sheldon Cohen and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon, published in Psychological Science in 2015: 404 healthy adults reported their hugs and their interpersonal conflicts by telephone on fourteen consecutive evenings, were then exposed to a cold virus under quarantine, and were monitored for infection. Hugging accounted for roughly a third of the buffering effect that social support had on illness.

Read closely, that study measured two things at once — hugs received and support perceived — and it is the second that a message can deliver, which is precisely what this day trades on. Where touch is available, duration appears to matter more than technique: a 2021 study in Acta Psychologica found one-second hugs were rated less pleasant and less under control than hugs of five or ten seconds, while arm-crossing style made little difference. Neither result turns a June observance into medicine. Neither is a reason to skip it.

It is not the same as the other hug days

Three observances get folded into this one, and the differences are straightforward. National Hugging Day falls on 21 January and is by far the best documented: Kevin Zaborney conceived it in 1986 and it was first marked that year from Clio, Michigan, the date chosen for the flat stretch between the winter holidays and the birthdays of late January. It is explicitly about hugging people in person, and it carries a trademark and a copyright registration.

Share a Hug Day is a separate observance on 30 July with no documented founder. The International Day of Friendship also falls on 30 July, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in resolution 65/275 on 27 April 2011. None of the three is Happy Heart Hugs Day and none shares its date, so an invitation to mark 28 June in honour of a day that arrives a month later is simply an error.

How to mark Happy Heart Hugs Day

One instruction, from the founder: say something true to someone too far away to hug. Everything below is a way of doing that.