Written by Lilly Sparks

What turns you on isn’t random. Your desire has a shape, a rhythm, a style. And once you can name it, everything about your sex life gets easier (and a lot more fun).

That’s why we created the afterglow auras, a map of the 9 most common pleasure archetypes. Think of them as your personal intimacy personality — not who you are in the world, but what you reach for in your private moments. Take the quiz, meet your aura, and explore a whole new layer of yourself.

The beginning of the auras are afterglow’s pillars of good sex: Authenticity, Presence, Communication and Connection.

Each exists on a spectrum:

• Authenticity moves between candid and idealized;
• Presence ranges from objectified to embodied
  
• Connection flows between tender and wild
  
• Communication lives between implicit and explicit.

To make these dynamics easier to understand, and way more fun to explore, we combined the two emotional pillars (Connection + Communication) into a single dimension of Gentle ↔ Intense, and paired the identity pillars (Authenticity + Presence) into a dimension of Real ↔ Polished. 

Put those two axes together and you get a simple 3×3 matrix: nine unique afterglow auras. Each aura represents a distinct arousal style.  It’s your personal pleasure “vibe”, but none of them are fixed. You might gravitate toward one, overlap with a few, or shift over time. 

Below, you’ll find a quick tour of all nine archetypes so you can meet your own or explore at will.