Scientifically speaking, sugilation, better known as a hickey, is a type of bruise called ecchymosis that arises due to a strong suction made with the mouth on some part of the body, usually the neck. Its color evolution usually goes from black and purple to orange and yellow, passing through blue and green; and lasts around fifteen days. A priori they are quite innocuous, but sometimes they can cause more serious problems than the purely aesthetic ones.
Last summer the news was published that a seventeen-year-old boy had died in Mexico from a hickey that his girlfriend had given him. Apparently, he had come home because he was having seizures after kissing her, and there he died of a stroke under the helpless gaze of his parents.
However, many doctors were quick to clarify that the possibility of this type of accident – a clot in a cerebral artery – is very remote. Charles Abrams, president of the American Society of Hematology, said that clots in veins or arteries usually form when blood flow is slow, something that can hardly produce a kiss and that, according to this scientist, would require a very powerful trauma.
Even so, it is not the first accident described in the medical literature by a loving sucking. In 2010, the New Zealand Medical Journal uncovered the case of a woman who suffered paralysis of one arm for several days due to a hickey.
