Your kissing style originates in the womb.
See a kiss in any Hollywood movie, painting, or sculpture and more often than not, you'll see couples leaning in to the right. Why is that? A German researcher observed over 100 couples and noted that two-thirds of them tilted their heads to the right. The scientific community at large theorizes that this instinct originates from the womb when we naturally tilted our heads to the right.Kissing takes serious muscle power.
One kiss requires 146 muscles to coordinate , including 34 facial muscles and 112 postural muscles. A team of British researchers — Elaine Sassoon, Annabelle Dytham, Robert Scully and Professor Gus McGrouther from the Rayne Institute in University College, London — studied kissing couples under an MRI scanner and found that a kiss mostly involves the orbicularis oris (the muscle around your mouth).
"Not only do you use your facial muscles in kissing, but approximately 112 postural muscles as well," Professor McGrouther said to The Telegra Yikes, sounds like a serious facial workout!Our love of kissing comes from ... rats?
Kazushige Touhara and colleagues at the University of Tokyo believe that our affinity for kisses descends from an ancient rat . Mice and men have a surprisingly similar genetic makeup — sharing a common ancestor that lived sometime between 75 and 125 million years ago. This ancient rat-like creature went by the name of Eomaia scansoria ( Eomaia , Greek for "ancient mother," and scansoria, Latin for "climber"). The science team theorizes that this creature would rub noses with a mate to sample his or her pheromones and signal desire. So, basically, human kissing is really rodent behavior. Who knew?The history of "X" behind XOXO traces back to the Middle Ages.
We use "XOXO" as an affectionate afterthought to our signature all the time in cards and love letters, but not many people know its origin story. Historians trace it back to the Middle Ages when most people couldn't read or write. The peasants used to mark "X" as a stand-in signature and then kissed the document as an added gesture of sincerity.A king once decreed that kissing be outlawed.
On July 16, 1439, King Henry VI banned kissing in England. (I know, seriously, what a buzzkill.) His reasoning? It was to curtail the spread of disease in the kingdom. Duly note that his mental breakdown around 1453 required his wife , Margaret of Anjou, to assume control of his kingdom. (So that's the level of crazy we were dealing with at this time.)
This went on to spur a lot of other weird smooching bans all over the world. Later in 16th-Century Naples, not only was kissing in public banned, but it was punishable by death as well.French kissers caused commuter headaches.
Oh, the French. Apparently in the early 20th century, so many French commuters were getting frisky on the train that they had to ban kissing altogether. So whenever you feel the train slow to a stop and hear the conductor's drone voice call out over the intercom that the train has stopped "due to a sick passenger aboard the train ahead"... you might have an idea of what's up.The luck of the Irish comes with a kiss.
Call it the (germ-infested) luck o' the Irish. Over 400,000 tourists gather to kiss the
Blarney Stone near Cork, Ireland, every year — dubbing it the most "unhygienic" tourist attraction in the world. According to local legend, those who bend over backward to kiss the stone are "greatly" rewarded with "the gift of the gab" — essentially meaning flattery. So if you're looking to obtain the name of sweet talker, you might want to take a trip to Blarney Castle. But be warned! It's been said that people have fallen to their deaths attempting the superstitious feat.
8. We almost didn't have epic movie kisses!
Titanic. Casablanca. Gone With The Wind. Spiderman. Some of the greatest kisses in Hollywood history almost never happened. Why? Back in 1930, a set of censorship regulations called The Hays Code prohibited acting couples from kissing in a horizontal position (as in, lying down). Also, married couples had to sleep in twin beds on screen and, if kissing action did happen on beds, one actor had to have their foot on the ground. Oh yeah, and they couldn't kiss for longer than three seconds. Not exactly the picture of romance, right?
Well, directors had a way around this. While filming the 1946 film Notorious, Alfred Hitchcock had Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant repeatedly kiss, briefly disrupted by dialogue and movement. It's now considered one of the sexiest movie scenes of the time. Luckily, this pain of a ban dropped in the late 1960s.