Let $γ_{d}$ be the $d$-dimensional standard Gaussian measure and $\{Q_{t}\}_{t\ge 0}$ the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck semigroup acting on $L^{1}(γ_{d})$. We show that the hypercontractivity of $\{Q_{t}\}_{t\ge 0}$ is equivalent to the property that \begin{align*} \left\{ \int_{\mathbb{R}^{d}}\exp \left(e^{2t}Q_{t}f\right) dγ_{d} \right\} ^{1/e^{2t}} \le \int_{\mathbb{R}^{d}}e^{f}\,dγ_{d}, \end{align*} which holds for any $f\in L^{1}(γ_{d})$ with $e^{f}\in L^{1}(γ_{d})$ and for any $t\ge 0$. We then derive a family of inequalities that unifies this exponential variant and the original hypercontractivity, a generalization of the Gaussian logarithmic Sobolev inequality is obtained as a corollary. A unification of the reverse hypercontractivity and the exponential variant is also provided.