(From the Sept 2002 issue of Gear magazine)
The 1927 movie Don Juan had 127 on-screen kisses. This remains a record.
In 1926 in Japan, where kissing was considered “unclean, immodest, indecorous, ungraceful and likely to spread disease,” Tokyo’s Prefect of Police cut 800,000 feet of celluloid kisses from American movies.
Typically a person has their first kiss around the age of 14.
After the first kiss, we then spend over 20,000 minutes kissing before we die.
The longest kiss in history: 29 hours.
Underwater: 2 minutes and 18 seconds.
Ancient Romans eye-kissed as their form of greeting.
In medieval Italy, if a man and a woman were seen kissing in public, they could be forced to marry. This pretty much kept PDA’s in check.
Nose rubbing, once thought to be an Eskimo-only form of kissing, a result of their wearing so many clothes, is practiced by Polynesians and Malaysians, too.
It’s a crime to kiss a “stranger” in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. How this is enforced isn’t clear; Having kissed, are you still strangers?
Mustached men who “habitually kiss human beings” in Indiana are breaking the law and should seek an alternative.
There is, apparently, no legal obstacle to kissing , say, cows in Indiana.
In Boston, Massachusetts, the law forbids kissing in front of a church. Like there was a crowd there anyway.
Husbands who kiss their wives before leaving home every day live up to five years longer than those who do not. This is a scientific fact.
A kiss burns 26 calories per minute on average. More if done with enthusiasm. They ran tests for that.
Heat seeking: Tests have discovered special neurons in people’s brains that help locate others lips in the dark.
You’re more likely to catch the common cold by shaking hands than by kissing.
Kissing stimulates the production of saliva, which washes away bits of food and bacteria, thus preventing cavities – that’s why the Academy of General Dentistry endorses it.
The Bible endorses kissing as a gesture of kindness when it says, “Greet ye one another with a kiss of charity” (1 Peter 5:14)
It took pilgrims visiting St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rom 503 years to kiss the toes off the metal statues of St. Peter. The lip-friction simply wore away the metal.
Karolina Stefanski