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Food

Sex and Coffee: The Anatomical Lid You Make Out With

Take your unhealthy coffee obsession to the next level.
Images courtesy the artist

Statistically, if you're reading this, you're at least a little bit addicted to coffee. This unhealthy addiction to the brown sludge that fuels the masses gets a lot more surreal when considering Korean designer Jang WooSeok's latest work, Coffee Lid: Take 'Kiss' Out, a disposable coffee cup lid shaped like pursed lips and a nose. Sip through this, it seems, and your anthropomorphized cup of Joe (or Jane, we suppose) sips you back.

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"I love both coffee and kisses," WooSeok explains her creation to The Creators Project. "Coffee can be had for some money every day, but kisses can't. So I created Take 'Kiss' Out for my sexual desire—just kidding." It's no joke, though, there are actual, real scientific studies linking the relationship between sex and coffee suggesting that it boosts the female sex drive, and that up to two cups of coffee a day, "triggers a chemical reaction that increases blood flow to the penis by relaxing muscles." The drink is seemingly so sensual, there are even recipes online for making sex coffee by infusing it with maca, cacao, and coconut milk. At what point does our humanization of this brown bean sludge stop being laugh-off-ably "unhealthy," and become legitimately creepy?

The cultural fusion of human sexuality and the inanimate coffee is implicit in WooSeok's inspiration for Take 'Kiss' Out. "Drinking coffee through a take-out lid reminded me of lips and kissing," she says. The hapless caf-fiends among us would be hard-pressed to deny her observation: the value in seeing that feeling visualized is that it forces the coffee lover/addict to make a choice: embrace dependence like your lonely aunt and cats, or reject it. Or, y'know, don't think about it too hard.

See more of Jang WooSeok's work on Behance.

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