Kiss – From cave to big screen.

Motherly, friendly, French, movie, Judas... People are kissing each other from the beginning of time. Here are some of the most interesting theories about how and why was kissing invented.

Sexologists say that a kiss is even more intimate then the act of sex itself, regardless the fact is that kiss is the most frequent physical contact among people. 99.9 percent of people on the planet know what kiss is, but very few know the real truth about the origin and meaning of the kiss.

Kiss is a powerful phenomenon, that’s for sure. If you think about it, you will come to the conclusion that kiss had an influence on the course of life of every man, it was the beginning and test of survival of every relationship, and it has significantly influenced the history of mankind. Film industry has recognized the power of kiss, but also and people from show business. You can still hear stories about how Madonna kissed Britney Spears at one of the MTV awards, right?


Even today, the phenomenon of kissing is not fully explained. We even have a branch of science that studies kissing and it’s called filematology.

No one is definitely sure why people started touching each other with lips and exchange saliva, but it is known that this kind of physical contact was present even in the period around 1,500 BC.

According to one theory, the kiss was created because of practical reasons – so that people can lick salt from each other’s cheeks. The Vedic scriptures describe the phenomenon of kissing as an act of affection. It is believed that the kiss has culturally spread from India via Greece, and that Alexander the Great is the most creditable for that, because he brought it to Europe during the great invasion in 326 BC. Besides spices and tea, the great commander had, allegedly, brought and something that was even hotter and spicier then the tea and spices together – the kiss, which conquered Europe with the speed of fire.

There are different opinions about the origin of the kiss. According to one legend it was invented by medieval knights who were trying to determine in this way if their wives had drunk the juicy mead. According to another theory, the kiss derived from the relationship between mother and child. Allegedly, cave mothers, who didn’t have blender like today’s mothers, were chewing the food and then, with their mouth, they were feeding their children.

Some cultures knew of kissing long before others, but they considered that act too private and didn’t discussed nor write about it for many years and centuries. Even Bible says that God kissed a man and gave him life through that kiss. 

Some cultures like Finnish, Burmese, Polynesian, Philippinian, or cultures of African tribes consider kissing as weird, absurd and rude. They have ways of greeting like nose rubbing or gasping at the throat. In this way, they can recognize each member of the tribe based on his smell.

Some even believe that kissing evolved as a way of spreading bacteria between partners. In this way they would become immune to each other’s diseases, and were able to have kids. At the time of Ancient Rome, kissing was used as a way of showing status – that status was ranked according to permission to kiss a certain part of the body. Those who have enjoyed higher status were kissing each other on the cheek and arm, while ordinary mortals had permission to kiss feet.

In Chinese tradition, it is considered that the ideal balance between yin and yang can be achieved only by exchanging "liquid jade", better known as saliva, or, in romantic terms – with a French kiss.

In Naples, in 1562, kissing in public was forbidden, and those who were caught in that act were condemned to death.

In Hartford, Connecticut, the old law, which is still in force, considers it illegal for a man to kiss his wife on Sundays. And in Indiana, until recently, there was a law that strictly forbidden men with mustaches to kiss women - probably for reasons of hygiene.

English word “kiss” originates from Germanic word “kussian”, which onomatopoetically imitates what happens during kiss. What is considered as a French kiss in western world, in India is called English kiss.

Name „movie kiss“ says by itself that a kiss had a significant role in the film industry. In 2005, a movie called “Brokeback Mountain” attracted much attention because of description of sexual relation between men, but the first kiss of two men was shown much earlier – some eighty years before, in a movie “Wings” from 1927. However, the first homosexual kiss was shown even before that – in a movie “Manslaughter” from 1922, where two lesbians were kissing each other.

For a long time, the longest kiss in film history was the one between Jane Wyman and Regis Toomey – it lasted three minutes and five seconds. However, in 2010, that record was broken by Neckar Zadegan and Traci Dinwiddie with a longest movie kiss, and also the longest lesbian kiss in a movie.

In the movie “Some Like It Hot” from 1959, actor Tony Curtis, who plays Joe or Josephine after he disguises himself as female band member, shocked the public when he said that his kiss with Sugar (Marilyn Monroe) was like "kissing with Hitler." He later gave an explanation for his statement and said that such a stupid question (How did he like kissing a sex symbol like Marilyn) deserved an equally stupid answer. “What was I supposed to say? What do you think it’s like to kiss Marilyn Monroe you dickheads?” – Curtis said.

In 1929, Greta Garbo appeared in MGM’s last silent film called “Kiss”. It was the end of silent film era, but not the era of kisses.

In 1984, Rock Hudson kissed Linda Evans in “Dynasty”. And when it was reveled that he had AIDS, Hollywood was swept with panic that she was infected too. The actress revealed later that the people around her didn’t want to come near her because they had kids and they didn’t want to expose themselves to risk.

In Indian cinema, kiss was forbidden for a long time. The first real kiss with open mouth and a tongue was shown in Indian cinemas through a little-known English film from 1926.

Around the world, there are some pretty interesting but also and vulgar names for a kiss. People on Maldives use a term, which, when translated, means “lip sucking”, and the kiss in South Africa is called “tongue in lungs”.

Interestingly, the kissing was unknown to many people. Indians and Aborigines didn’t kiss before meeting Europeans. After that, they introduced that custom.

Also, one of the biggest misapprehensions is that the French have invented the French kiss. They haven’t even gave it its name. The truth is that in 1923 this term was forged in England.  And the only reason this kiss has that “French” in its name is because the French, at the beginning of the 19th century were known as amorous persons.

Kissing is good for your health

Scientists have discovered that kissing has multiple positive effects on health because it increases the secretion of hormone of happiness.  Even bacteria, which are present in the saliva, with their mixing contribute to stronger immunity; they are breaking down plaque in the mouth and are destroying harmful microorganisms. Kissing is also good for dental health because it stimulates the secretion of saliva, which, on the other hand, has a function of washing the mouth and removing the remains of food.

Clinical tests have shown that touching, including kissing, reduces blood pressure, stress, and improves the immune status of the organism. Many believe that the activation of a large number of facial muscles during kissing is preventing the appearance of wrinkles and is slowing the aging process.

Kissing is pleasure

The lips are definitely made for kissing. They are the thinnest part of our body and 100 times more sensitive than our fingers. The tongue and the inside of the oral cavity contain enormous amount of nerves that are transmitting messages directly to the limbic system, the oldest part of the brain associated with sexual pleasure. A kiss is stimulating the secretion of the hormone oxytocin, which affects parts of the brain responsible for pleasure and adrenalin, and thus creating the feeling of butterflies in our stomach.

Facts about kissing

-    Two thirds of men are leaning their heads to the right when they are kissing someone;
-    Most kisses are shown in the movie "Don Juan" from 1926 - 191 kiss in 110 minutes;
-    In 1990, Alfred Wolfram kissed a 8001 person in a period of eight hours at a festival in Minnesota – he kissed, on average, 16 persons per minute.
-    Men who are kissing their wives before going to work, on average, are earning more money than those who do not do that;
-    The only animals that are kissing each other’s mouth are chimpanzees, orangutans and cats;
-    In just one exchange of saliva during a kiss, there is more than 278 species of bacteria, and many of them can cause various diseases;
-    A passionate kiss can increase the level of hormones in your body so high, that it can take away one minute of your life;
-    During his life, a man is spending approximately 336 hours or two full weeks kissing someone.
-    One French kiss is activating 23 muscles;
-    Ten minutes of kissing is burning 30 calories;
-    70 percent of people experience their first kiss before they turn 15.

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Perfume that smells like a woman! - Chanel No.5

In 1954, Marilyn Monroe sealed the immortality of the perfume “Chanel No. 5”. When she was asked in an interview what does she wear when she goes to bed, she replied: "Two drops of Chanel No. 5".






In 2011, Chanel No.5 is celebrating 90 years of its existence. In 2008, this perfume was proclaimed as the best perfume of all times. Today, this is the best-selling and most famous perfume ever created. 2011 is also marking 40 years since the death of Chanel No.5’s creator - fashion designer Coco Chanel.

Legend has it that this fragrance got its name when Coco Chanel, after presented with several bottles filled with different fragrances for testing, chose the one with number five written on its label. According to other sources, Coco Chanel chose this name because the fragrance was created on the fifth day of the fifth month, in 1921.

This is not only the first perfume in history that was signed with designer's name, but also the first that didn’t just smelled like flowers - as Coco said, this perfume "smelled like woman".

Woman liberated from fashion and social constraints and “The more feminine a woman, the stronger she is” as Coco Chanel used to say, will become a source of inspiration for her creations, for almost fifty years. Although she didn’t considered herself as fighter for women's rights, her revolutionary ideas (in the first half of the twentieth century) regarding the design of dresses, removal of corsets and other accessories, integration of men's and sports clothes or their elements in women's clothing, and undressing of woman's body, were consistent with ideas on the emancipation of women, and thus with the ideas of the feminist movements. 

There are those who believe that Coco "simply" knew how to follow the spirit of her time. Someone once said that a wheel, the one from a bike, did more for the emancipation of women than all women's rights movements altogether. In Coco’s time, women started riding a bicycle, skiing, and even driving a car. They wouldn’t be able to do all this with corsets on them. Before Coco, women were able to ride a horse, but they were obliged to sit on one side, with gathered legs. Then Coco Chanel came and designed riding pants for women. During World War II, when they were replacing men in factories, women had to go to work in practical clothes and short hair. This new lifestyle demanded from women to dress simply, and Coco Chanel’s clothing responded precisely to this demand. The simplicity of her models is linked with her idea that the elegance is hiding in simplicity, but also with economic depression, which sought efficiency in clothes manufacturing.

Whatever the case, there is no doubt that Coco Chanel was the one who liberated the female body, the one who created a new woman look and the one who invented the fashion of the twentieth century. This was enough for TIME magazine to add her on the list of 100 most influential people of the past century.

Although she claimed that she was born on August 19, 1893, in the French town Saumur, her real birth date was ten years earlier. She was born as Gabrielle Chasnel, but, thanks to the mistake of hospital employees when they were filling up the documents, she remained Chanel till the end of her life. She was illegitimate child in a poor family that was made of a market stallholder, a laundrywoman, and five other children. When Gabrielle was 12 years old, her mother died and her father left the family. She spent the next five years in an orphanage, which was very important to her because there she learned dressmaking.

After the orphanage, she went to Paris where she performed in cabarets as a singer and dancer. There she got her artistic name – Coco. Her career as a singer didn’t last for very long and Coco began to design hats, which were an essential fashion accessory in those times. With financial support from her lover Étienne Balsan, in 1909 she opened her first boutique. With this boutique her ambitions started to grow – to expand her business by creating clothes that would be, in the same time, comfortable, casual, simple and modern. The hats that she designed earlier, and thanks to whom she became very popular in the Parisian fashion world, were just like that.  She didn’t use feathers and flowers, which were very popular then, and instead of wide rims which caused headaches and neck spasms, she designed small and simple hats.

Coco started to dismiss canons - dresses that were in fashion then were truly luxurious, but they changed the natural shape of the body and drowned women in lace and corsets. Her ideal and her great discovery was a fashion in which woman's body can move freely.

“Most women dress for men and want to be admired. But they must also be able to move, to get into a car without bursting their seams! Clothes must have a natural shape.” – Coco Chanel said.

It is very common today to see a woman wearing jeans and trousers, but not many people know that Coco Chanel was one who initiated this trend. She was often inspired with men’s fashion and in 1920’s she decided to design clothes for women very similar to clothes for men. This is how the almost boyish designed outfits were created. Such clothes implied and pants for women, something that was almost unthinkable in those times.

Perhaps her greatest achievement was the creation of "little black dress" in 1926. Half a century later, this dress was included in the ten unavoidable clothes that every woman must have, even in our modern times. At the time of its creation, this dress was almost scandalous: black clothing was reserved exclusively for a period of mourning and wearing it on other occasions was not only considered as a lack of taste, but as profanity. The first little black dress also disturbed the conservatives and because it significantly revealed a woman’s body: it was sleeveless and her length was just below the knees. The secret of success of "little black dress" lies in its simplicity, elegance and sophistication, as well as in its wide use. It can be worn during the day, but also in the evening. It can be made from expensive, but also and from cheaper materials. Audrey Hepburn made it even more popular by wearing it in the movie "Breakfast at Tiffany's", in 1961. 

Her ideas were not only limited to the design of clothes. She is also meritorious for the most famous color of lipstick, pinky-red, which she created in 1924. Coco Chanel stylized her creations by creating additional accessories that made her models unique.  An integral part of her Chanel style were flower on lapel, or costume or real jewelry, and also flat shoes which were consistent with her idea of comfort and simple look. Women might still wore purses in hand, if it never occurred to Chanel to attach a chain on them.

Her inventions are even today essential elements of women's wardrobe: skirts and jersey dresses, scarf, woman shirt, skirt with pleats, cotton blouse-sweater, sweater with high collar, blazer, strapless dress, and raincoat. In her opinion, woman should feel in her clothes just as men feel in theirs. She believed than men and women are equal, despite the fact that women, in her time, were not allowed to vote.

Because of love affair with a German officer, during World War II, she didn’t returned to fashion world until 1954. Her return once again brought liberating creations – she designed the Chanel costume, which was casual and loose model in comparison to uptight fashion of that time. This costume is popular even today.

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Marilyn Monroe - Madness and her last days

In the book “Fragments”, which is based on diaries, letters and various writings of Marilyn Monroe, sex symbol of the 20th century, it is revealed that after a series of psychiatric sessions she ended up in mental hospital’s solitary confinement, and that doctor Greenson came there to examine – her breasts.

"Alone!!! I am alone-I am always alone no matter what." – with this begins the earliest of several diaries written by Marilyn Monroe, sexiest and most desirable women of the 20th century, according to "Playboy". Her diaries, sketches, poems, letters, various notes and rare photographs, dating from between 1951 and 1961, are published (in 2010) in a book called "Fragments". They are significant because, for the first time, Marilyn Monroe explains herself – she is presented outside of Hollywood splendor, myths and legends that were woven around her name in recent decades.

That book revealed her fears of sexual abuse, betrayal of her third husband, ghosts of inherited madness, traumas from psychotherapy to which she was forced, and an eerie testimony about the mental hospital in which she was involuntarily taken.

Of countless men who have passed through her life the most famous was John F. Kennedy, the most faithful was Joe DiMaggio… but the most trace in her life left her third husband, playwright Arthur Miller, who managed to make her the happiest and most unhappiest woman in the world.

Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller were probably in their happiest phase during the summer of 1957, which they spent in a rented house on Long Island. They spent their time there swimming and taking long walks on the beach. She looked splendidly on the photographs from that period. That was the time when she happily stepped into her husband’s world - She was joyful and witty at the dinner in the company of writers Carson McCullers and Isak Dinesen, she became friends with Truman Capote,  and met some of her literary heroes such as poet Carl Sandburg and writer Saul Bellow, with whom she had dinner while she waited for the premiere of “Some Like It Hot" in Chicago. The sexiest blonde knocked Bellow of his feet.

Writers and books were not a coincidence in her life. "Esquire" once published a photo of her reading James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. There was also a photo of her reading the poetry of Heinrich Heine. Magazine “Life” once depicted Marilyn reading a book in front of a shelve with books. She had her personal library with 400 volumes that included works of history, philosophy, fiction...

In London, where they traveled in the fall of that same year to film her "The Prince and the Showgirl" movie with Laurence Olivier, Miller caused her greatest disappointment in life. 

Marilyn and her husband moved to a magnificent estate in Surrey, near London. Everything seemed perfect. She was producing a film in which played (and was directed by) one of the most respected actors of her generation and she lived in a large country house with the man she loved the most. As an artist she couldn’t have felt more fulfilled, until a coincidence buried her otherwise very fragile self-confidence and her trust in her husband.  She ran into a Miller’s diary in which he complained that he was disappointed with her and that sometimes he is ashamed having her in his company in front of friends. After reading those entries, Marilyn was destroyed.  One of her biggest fears came true - that she will disappoint the man she loves.

Formally speaking, Marilyn Monroe was not an orphan because her mother Gladys Monroe Baker eventually outlived her famous daughter. But since Gladys was a schizophrenic who spent years going in and out of psychiatric institutions, Marilyn was virtually abandoned and raised in a number of adoptive families, including the family of her mother’s close friend Grace Goddard.

Her first husband, James Dougherty, liked the idea of saving a shy and nice girl, who left high school to marry him. It is not surprising that their marriage fell apart - they divorced in September 1946. “My relationship with him was basically insecure from the first night I spent alone with him,” Marilyn wrote in her diary.

Her second marriage with baseball player Joe DiMaggio, who was one of the most famous names in sport‘s world, also failed. Their marriage lasted only nine months. DiMaggio was almost in his forties and he wanted, with all his heart, for his wife to leave Hollywood and become a housewife. Instead, he became "Mr. Monroe”, and that was too much for his jealousy and frustration. However, when she died, for twenty years DiMaggio sent flowers to her grave three times a week.

She began to visit psychotherapists at the urging of her acting teacher Lee Strasberg, to whom she went in the spring of 1955 because she wanted to become a serious actress. Strasberg was more than a teacher to her; he was almost a father she never met. By the wish of Marilyn Monroe, Strasberg became executor of her will, which was then heavy about 13 million of dollars. After Strasberg’s death, his widow, Anna Mizrahi Strasberg, inherited that right. She even today earns about a million dollars thanks to Marilyn Monroe’s name.

Persuaded by Strasberg, and after breaking up her marriage with DiMaggio, Marilyn visited a psychiatrist five times a week. Dr. Margaret Hohenberg managed to pull out from Marilyn’s subconscious memories of a difficult childhood, including memories of sexual abuse and harassment of her aunt, Ida Martin, with whom she stayed a few times when she was between 11 and 13 years old.

Two years later, in 1957, Marilyn stopped seeing Dr. Hohenberg. Strasberg then recommended her another doctor, Marianne Kris, who later caused one of the greatest traumas in Marilyn’s life.  During sessions with her, Marilyn discovered that she was always “deeply terrified to really be someone's wife” because she knew “from life one cannot love another, ever, really”.

Three years later, after being totally rejected by Miller (he didn’t even came to her funeral), Marilyn Monroe became Yves Montand’s mistress. Her new doctor became Ralph Greenson – it is not known how much he managed to help her, but it is certain that he was obsessed with Marilyn. Greenson’s daily therapeutic sessions lasted about five hours, but nevertheless, in 1960, in a state of complete emotional disintegration, and upon the recommendation of Dr. Kris, Marilyn ended up in a psychiatric hospital in New York.

Practically, as soon as she entered, Marilyn started requesting to leave. But the more she was persistent about it, the employees of the hospital was more confident in her disease, and they eventually put her into a solitary confinement. Marilyn wrote a letter to Greenson in which she described what were they doing to her, but instead of getting her out of that hospital, he came to examine – her breasts. From hell that lasted for three days she was rescued by DiMaggio.

Marilyn became acquainted with Kennedy brothers in 1961, but she met some members of that family at least five years earlier. She wrote in her diary, that she fears that Peter Lawford, Kennedy’s brother-in-law, wants to hurt her - the feeling of violence I’ve had lately about being afraid of Peter he might harm me, poison me, etc.

In August 1962, Marilyn Monroe was found dead. It is assumed that she committed suicide by drinking a large quantity of sleeping pills.

Childhood – Her guardian wanted to rape her when she was just six years old

In her diaries, Marilyn also wrote about her first marriage with an intelligent and attractive James Dougherty. She married Dougherty on June 19, 1942, when she was just 16, and he was five years older. Marilyn described her loneliness and insecurity in that sudden marriage, which was less love and more of a way for Marilyn – then Norma Jeane Baker – to seize the opportunity to escape from the life of an orphan, while her guardians, Grace and Ervin Goddard, were in California. Especially because Ervin tried to rape Marilyn when she was just six years old.

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