About
Most of what we want to say about 141 Kinks lives in the rest of the site — the quiz itself, the resources page, the privacy and terms documents underneath. This is the part of the conversation that didn't fit on the landing screen: what we're trying to make, where it came from, who's making it, and what we believe about the corner of the web it sits in.
Nothing here is required reading. We wrote it for the friends and partners who, having seen the quiz, asked us why we bothered.
Where this came from
For a while now we'd been watching a familiar pattern. The kink lists circulating in forums and group chats are usually generous and almost always a decade out of date — organised by whoever happened to make them, missing the things that turn out to matter, naming the things that don't. The clinical literature is good but isn't for civilians. And the conversation that real long-term partners are trying to have — the one where you don't quite know how to begin a question, and a personality quiz isn't the right shape for the answer — is poorly served by either of those.
We wanted something between. A list curated rather than collected. Categories that mean something rather than fall to alphabet. Weighting by how much each thing matters to you, not a flat checkbox count. And a comparison flow built so that two people who already know each other could use it to start a conversation that's hard to start cold.
That's the whole brief. Everything else came from trying to do that one thing well.
What we believe about the work
A handful of convictions sit underneath the design choices we've made. None of them are clever; all of them are load-bearing.
Kink isn't a personality, a phase, or a diagnosis. It's part of how some people are oriented toward intimacy. Treating it that way — without sensationalism, without pathology, without coyness — is harder than it sounds, and the whole tone of the site is calibrated for it.
Self-knowledge here is earned by clicking through specifics, not by picking from a personality menu. A four-letter type tells you nothing especially useful. A weighted shape across 141 specific items, with the things that matter most made visible, can tell you quite a lot.
Privacy on this kind of site is architectural, not promotional. We could collect quiz data tomorrow and learn fascinating things from it; we've designed the site so that we can't. That's an active choice, and we'd rather wear it as a constraint than print it as a slogan.
The partner-comparison flow has to sit somewhere between a party game and a clinical intake form. Neither register fits the conversation real couples are trying to have. We've spent more time on this than on anything else and we don't think we're done.
None of this is meant to replace a therapist. The resources page is where we point people who want depth on a specific area, and the practitioners listed there have spent careers developing what we've spent a few years on.
Putting the 141 together
The number isn't sacred. We started by collecting every kink list, partner inventory, and educator checklist we could find back to the late 1990s, then cross-referenced what we'd assembled against contemporary clinical and educator sources. From there the work was mostly editorial: items that were really three things wearing one name got split, items that were really one thing wearing three got merged, and language that had aged out got rewritten.
The sixteen categories aren't a typology and aren't trying to be. They're a way of arranging the surface area so the radar chart is legible, the comparison with a partner is meaningful, and dimensions that overlap in real life sit next to each other on the wheel rather than across from one another.
Who's making it
141 Kinks is a project of the Hazel Hyena Team — a small group with backgrounds in product design, lived community, and the long tail of half-broken kink quizzes friends kept handing us. We work mostly anonymously, and on purpose. The territory is private; we'd like the work judged on the work, and we'd like the people who know us in our day jobs to find their way here on their own time.
The Kink Spectrum Project is the umbrella the work sits under. It exists so that the rights, the trademark, and the editorial direction live somewhere stable, and so the project can outlive any one of us if it ever needs to.
There are no investors, no advertising, and no commercial partners. The site is self-funded by the team, and we'd like to keep it that way.
Changes
We'll update this page when the project's motivation, methodology, or the team behind it changes in any meaningful way. Last updated April 2026.
Contact: team@141kinks.com. Methodology questions, gentle corrections, items we missed, lived counterexamples — they all land in the same inbox, and they're read by people.