From The Straits Times    |

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Image by AFP relaxnews

It’s a cocktail designed to taste like kissing a cleanly shaven man who’s just had a cigarette. And according to the Dutch creator who reduced the sensory — and suggestive — experience to drink form, that involves licking a viscous liquid off a plate.

Curated by the Museum of Sex in New York, the cocktail known alternately as “Lickable Skin” and “Pareidolia,” debuted at the museum’s recently opened bar Play.

You could call it sex in a glass — if there was one. Instead, the ‘cocktail,’ a thick, white, opaque liquid is presented on a small, custom-designed, black, ribbed, porcelain plate that has to be licked or slurped.

Awkward? Unabashedly sexual and lasciviously suggestive? Yes, that’s the point, says creator Bart Hess.

“The whole experience should be this point where you want to lick it, but you’re not really sure if you want to. I was going for a sensation that you can’t really explain.”

Lickable Skin is made with sake, rhum agricole and yuzu, while the ribbed plate is meant to resemble alien skin.

The cocktail also goes by the name Pareidolia, the clinical name given to the psychological phenomenon that causes some people to see or hear a vague random image, like Jesus in a grilled cheese sandwich or the man in the moon.

At Play, customers also sidle up to the bar asking for drinks like Loose Women and Pickpockets, She’s Leaving Home and Rosebud, designed to evoke the female breast made with Hendrick’s gin or vodka, St.-Germain, rose-infused black vermouth, ginger, lemon, garnished with a small rosebud.