12 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Kissing

Kissing is a way to show affection that can be a lot of fun, not to mention having been scientifically proven to give couples a greater emotional connection than physical intimacy. There has even been proof that people remember their first kiss far better and more vividly than their first sexual experience. People don’t tend to over-think or dissect things that are such a joyful part of their lives, but here are a few things that you might not know about the best and most satisfying way to express affection.

The Science of Kissing

There is a scientific word for everything under the sun, and that includes kissing. The term for the study of kissing is “philematology”; the scientific term for French kissing is “cataglottism.”


Speaking of Words
The word “kiss” comes from the Old English “cyssan,” which in turn comes
from the proto-Germanic “kussijinan” or “kuss.” These words are believed
to have come from the sound that kissing makes.


Work It Out
Locking lips is a physical affair, but exactly how physical? The average person burns about 2 calories for every minute of kissing; a passionate make out can burn up to 6 calories a minute.

Literary Evidence
The kiss is a popular subject for poetry and literature across all languages and cultures. The very first mention of the kiss in written word was in the Four Vedic Sanskrit texts, which dates back to 1500 B.C.

Potty Mouth
It’s widely known that the human mouth is an extremely dirty place. With one kiss, persons exchange anywhere from 10 million to 1 billion bacteria. As gross as that sounds, exchanging a kiss with a sick person is less likely to give you a cold than shaking their hand.

Time Of Your Life
Quantifying all of the daily activities really helps to put things into perspective. The average person does enough kissing to fill up two weeks of his or her life.


A Violent Affair
Kissing is supposed to be nice, but it can have horrible unexpected consequences. In China, a man kissed his girlfriend so hard that he reduced the pressure in her mouth, which resulted in rupturing her eardrum.

Make Out Physiology
There are a great many facial muscles involved in kissing – a full-on French kiss involves up to 34 muscles. The most important of all though is the orbicularis oris, the muscle that allows the lips to pucker.

Guinness World Record

The current world record holders for the longest kiss belong to Ekkachai and Laksana Tiranarat of Thailand. On February 14th, 2013 they broke the current smooching milestone with a 58 hour, 35 minute, 58 second long kiss.

A Sensitive Subject
The human lips are extremely sensitive, 100 more sensitive than the tips of
the fingers. Not even your intimate bits are that sensitive.

Origin of the Act

So many scholars are unsure as to whether kissing is learned or instinctual. Because there are plenty of cultures around the world that don’t practice kissing, many lean towards the latter.

Cinematic History
You may see a lot of kissing in the movies nowadays, but that wasn’t always the case. Under the censorship of the Hays Code, which was enforced from 1930 to 1968, on-screen kissing was strictly regulated and
only allowed to last a few seconds. When kissing, if one person was lying
down then the other person had to be standing or sitting upright; if
spouses were kissing on the bed (film spouses slept in separate twin beds),
one or both of the couple had to have a foot on the floor.