💋 Why I Made a Quiz About Kissing
A modern love letter to connection, told through the lens of kissing, curiosity, and fun.
By Cinder Trout, Founder, Formulator, Mother, and Unofficial Kiss Researcher
Hi babes. Cinder here.
A tiny confession to start.
I’ve been single for almost ten years. (Although it’s hardly a confession, the three people who actually read my blog already know this about me.)
Not by accident. This era began the same year I started formulating ABATURE. Divorce, heartbreak, and a sudden need for a hands-on creative outlet. It was either skincare or cats, I guess… so here we are.
And yes, I had a therapist through all of it (and still do). Best decision I made as an adult. Even the healthiest humans benefit from having a space to unpack love, loss, and life’s obstacles without judgment.
Therapy helped me rebuild myself.
ABATURE helped me curate purpose.
Both coexist beautifully.
And while I was rebuilding, I was also dating.
A lot.
Hinge.
Bumble.
The League.
Even the app your friend makes you download at 1 a.m. with tequila logic. (We don’t need to talk about it.)
And here’s what I kept noticing.
Modern dating tells us who someone is, but rarely how they connect.
Not sex.
Not kink.
(Not whatever the “50 Shades & Fourth Wing” smut crowd is doing on Tuesday afternoons. Zero judgment, though. Get it, girls!)
I’m talking about intimacy. The subtle nuances of connection. The meaningful stuff that happens in between, in passing moments.
How someone kisses.
How they touch.
Whether PDA makes them melt or malfunction.
Their rhythm, their pace, their comfort with closeness.
Whether they’re a forehead-kiss person or a neck-kiss person.
The tiny details that quietly shape relationships.
I’m also the girl who plays 20 Questions with new matches over text. It’s flirty, it’s fun, and it weeds out creeps with shocking efficiency.
(If we dated and you’re sweating right now, maybe reflect a little, babe.)
But here’s the problem.
None of this lives on a dating profile or in a modern, accessible format.
So your girl (hi) made a quiz for it.
💋 Nostalgia Was the Spark. Intention Was the Point.
I was sharing with Tori one day about growing up in the 90s and how different dating was then. I spent more time talking to my girlfriends about dating than I actually spent with boys.
I told her how we used to buy printed magazines, and how completely obsessed we were with the Cosmo quizzes.
You know the ones.
“What Does Your Lip Gloss Flavor Say About You?”
“What Kind of Girlfriend Are You?”
“Is He Ready for a Relationship (or just hungry)?”
Those quizzes shaped entire eras of girlhood. They entertained the best sleepovers and choreographed three-hour phone calls with your besties… laying on the floor with my legs on the wall, twirling the twisty cord of my baby blue rotary phone around my finger, doodling on the back pages of Cosmopolitan, intoxicated by possibility. (Thank you, Hugh MacLeod, for those brilliant three words.) Life was SO good then.
And then I had an idea.
What if we brought that quiz magic back, but made it modern?
What if we created a quiz that wasn’t silly or throwaway, but actually revealed something honest and human about how we experience affection and build connection?
What if it felt like flipping to a glossy two-page magazine spread, built for the way we date and relate now?
Also… make it about lips.
So we did it.
We built a quiz about intimacy, and used kissing as our proxy.
Then we iterated.
Researched some more.
Iterated again.
Did a little field research (highly recommend 😘).
And iterated one last time.
💋 Six Months. Dozens of Versions. One Intentional Result.
What started as a novelty idea turned into a six-month research project. Including an epic make-out sesh in the back of a 4Runner in a Colorado mountain town on a first date until 1 a.m. 10/10, would do again! In the interest of science, of course 😉
We got deep into the science of connection.
We studied psychology.
We looked at attachment, intimacy, pacing, and comfort with closeness.
We wrote 30 questions, cut them to 20, expanded back to 25, and finally landed on 14.
Fourteen questions.
Three minutes.
Four archetypes.
She’s ready.
Every version was deliberate.
Every question was debated.
Every word mattered.
What we ended up with wasn’t a compatibility score or a pass-fail system.
It became something much more interesting.
A way to talk about and understand intimacy in a way that feels safe, playful, and accessible. Sans raunchy language, labels, and shame.
No answer is right or wrong.
It’s not about matching or mismatching.
It’s about feeling seen.
💋 Simply Named: The Kiss Quiz
The Kiss Quiz is a playful, research-informed experience designed to reflect how you approach closeness.
Candidly, it began as a marketing idea, like most things do in an entrepreneur’s life. A way to engage people, spark curiosity, and invite them into the ABATURE world. But somewhere along the way, it became something else entirely. I chose to invest in the part of it that felt like connection, not conversion. Meaning over metrics. Curiosity over clicks.
I made it for fun, and to satisfy my own curiosity. So far, it’s resonated. Brilliantly, and with surprising accuracy.
It reveals one of four kiss archetypes. Not a label, but a mirror we hold up gently. I’m really proud of these. They feel accurate and relatable.
⚓️ The Anchor
🔥 The Firestarter
😉 The Tease
💔 The Heartbreaker
None is better than the other.
Each simply tells a different story about how you move toward intimacy.
💋 Why a Beauty Founder Cares This Much About Kissing
Because lips are more than lip balm, or revenue.
They tell stories.
They create connection.
They spark chemistry.
They communicate without a single word.
Your lips do emotional labor, and physical labor 😉, every day.
They deserve care.
The right ingredients.
The right texture.
The right rituals.
They also happen to be at the center of my life’s work.
My brand.
My packaging.
My products.
Even the memoir I’m quietly writing about this last decade of love, loss, dating, rebuilding, and becoming.
Two little letters keep showing up in all of it.
xx
They live in our brand.
They show up in STAXX.
They mean kisses.
They mean affection.
They mean endings and beginnings.
And yes, they happen to be in the title of a book I’m writing.
Full circle has a funny way of sneaking up on you like that.
💋 So Please… Take the Kiss Quiz! Enjoy It. Share It.
Send it to your crush.
Your boo.
Your partner or bestie.
Your group chat.
Share your results with me.
Or keep it just for yourself.
I hope it brings you joy.
I hope you laugh… and blush.
I hope you recognize yourself in it.
I hope you feel a little more understood.
If I leave the world having made a few lips softer and a few kisses better, that’s a pretty good story.
With love and soft lips,
xx
Cinder
The Science Behind The Kiss Quiz (nerd alert!)
If you’re curious about why we created the Kiss Quiz — the psychology, research, and micro-behaviors that shaped it — I wrote a deeper companion piece that dives into how we built the quiz and the science that supports it. It’s thoughtful, research-informed, and there's some pretty cool science.
👉 Read the companion research blog here to explore the psychology behind kissing, intimacy, and connection.
Last But Not Least… Let’s Talk Kiss Prep 💋
Okay, hello product placement — I’d be remiss not to talk kiss prep. If you’re walking around with dry, crusty lips (said with love), we need to get that handled. Start with my favorite: the Strawberry Lip Scrub. You only need to scrub for a few seconds and then rinse- big improvement immediately. Follow with a swipe of FATLIP Plumping Serum, because who doesn’t want fat, juicy lips? Let the serum soak in for 3 min, and finish it off with Champagne Lip Butter for the softest, pillowy lips imaginable. The Champagne is my favorite flavor, notes of apricot and bergamot... it's light and bubbly, you'll love it!
Fun fact: both the Strawberry and Champagne boxes feature portraits of me. I mean… if Taylor Swift can put her face on her albums, why can’t I grace the covers of my best hits? The cowgirl was drawn from a real portrait of me wearing my dad’s Stetson, while the Champagne box shows a cartoon version of me as a beauty brand CEO—because as my friends love to say, I’m a little country and a little cosmopolitan. This trio is my personal go-to set, I hope you love it as much as I do!
