Spicy stories have never been hotter. Here’s why — plus, five new ones.
Photo: Tonje Thilesen
Spend enough time reading romance, and you’ll start to see the peppers everywhere. Romance readers describe their favorite books like they’re hot sauces: So how many chile peppers does this have? This “spice scale,” usually a rating somewhere on the scale from one to five “peppers,” has become shorthand for a novel or story’s sexual content — sometimes referred to as “smut” in fan parlance. But what, exactly, each additional pepper measures is a subject of debate. The number of sex scenes? Anatomical detail? Narrative importance? General horniness? “Someone’s five is someone else’s one,” says Leah Koch, co-owner of the Brooklyn- and L.A.-based romance bookstore the Ripped Bodice. “You have to understand it’s subjective.”
When The Very Definition of Love was published in June, author Sophia Benoit was surprised to see readers rate it at two peppers: 🌶️🌶️. She had figured her Regency romance, in which a wallflower receives sex lessons from a notorious rake, was explicit enough to warrant four. She could live with three. But two? “I got pretty self-conscious,” Benoit says. “I use the C-word. I describe cunnilingus. What am I missing?”
The chile pepper belongs to a long tradition of horny taxonomy. In the late ’90s and early aughts, fan-fiction writers borrowed the citrus scale from anime fandom to evade moderation on sites like FanFiction.net. A lemon meant explicit sex; a lime, fade to black; an orange, kissing and other teen-friendly material; a grapefruit, something hard-core. But the fruit identifiers largely disappeared after the fanworks site Archive of Our Own (AO3) launched in 2009 and allowed writers to tag stories with specific sex acts instead.
Non-fanfic romance sites similarly developed scales of their own, including All About Romance’s sensuality ratings and Romance.io’s five flame levels. The short-lived Twitter account Does It Bang? kept things simple: Did anyone in the book have an orgasm? By 2021, chile peppers had broken through, according to writer, podcaster, and romance expert Andrea Martucci’s newsletter Shelf Love. They were common enough on BookTok and Bookstagram that publishers started using them in their own catalogues — with a little inflation. “If they say a book is a four, it’s probably a three,” Koch says.
For all the romance I’ve read — and I’ve read many romance novels, both spicy and otherwise — I’ve never found much use for the pepper scale. As a tween, I wandered the adult section of the library looking for pink covers and cursive fonts with little idea of what I’d find inside. I still mostly read that way, drawn in by a cover or jacket copy or, more often, by a recommendation from a trusted friend or an author I admire rather than another fan’s spice rating.
Full Steam Ahead
A week of spicy stories.
But plenty of other readers have firm preferences. At the Ripped Bodice, Koch says customers who ask about the spice scale often want one extreme or the other, especially if they grew up religious. Stephanie Barros, a Portland, Oregon–based writer and self-proclaimed former “purity-culture kid,” has a three-pepper minimum when she’s reading romance. Before starting a novel, she’ll flip three-quarters of the way through a book just to confirm it’s hot enough for her. “That part of me was repressed for so long,” Barros says. “I want to read smut. There’s so much connection to be found with the characters in those scenes.”
At Hopeless Romantic Books in Toronto, co-owner Kearston Bergeron displays the shop’s own version of a spice scale at the front of the store. “It’s a way to fight back against the stigma,” she says. “Nobody should feel ashamed of wanting spice in their books.”
But without a universally agreed-upon rating system in the romance community, what kind of spice each pepper designates can be difficult to determine. To get the best possible understanding of what the chiles mean — and how best to utilize them — I spoke with more than a dozen booksellers, authors, readers, and Bookstagrammers. Below are their thoughts on how to identify what’s hot.
Even the first pepper is up for debate. For some, a one-pepper romance goes no further than kissing, as in Talia Hibbert’s 2023 YA romance novel Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute. Other readers don’t start counting peppers until the characters have sex, period — even if it happens off-page.
Author Kimberly Lemming remembers seeing a reader give her 2025 sci-fi romance I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com a single chile pepper. She was baffled. “There are multiple ménages!” she tells me. The protagonist “gets mated to two aliens with strange tentacles!” Lemming’s own benchmark for a one-pepper read is T. Kingfisher’s Daggerbound, a romantasy in which lingering looks and flirtatious banter eventually lead to a fade-to-black sex scene.
Benoit, for her part, has always favored the spicier end of the spectrum. In high school, she would walk a mile to the library in 97-degree heat, then check the backs of romance novels to make sure the trip had been worth it. She wasn’t doing all that just for a chaste kiss. “I didn’t want to waste my time on a closed-door romance,” she says. “They needed to be doing something.” These days, Benoit needs to hear great things about a book from a trusted source before she even ventures into one-pepper territory. (One exception is Beth Brower’s series of epistolary novels, The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, which she describes as “witty, sweet, and so entertaining.”)
Jordan, an Atlanta-based Bookstagrammer who reads everything from closed-door romance to erotica, wishes more of her followers would give these “lower-heat” books a chance. “It’s about the romance of it all,” she says. Among her favorites are C. S. Poe’s Memento Mori, a queer detective-mystery series with a central romance that takes several books to reach a single vague sex scene, and E. L. Massey’s Breakaway series of closed-door hockey romances. “I’m always annoyed that I have to convince people to read those books because they are so good,” she says. “I have a lot less trouble getting people to read MateHub: Legend.”
Two peppers is a contentious category. At two, most seem to agree that sex happens, though readers might not get much of it. Think: multiple scenes but described in language that favors euphemism and emotion over anatomy or detailed scenes — but only one or two of them. Alison Finch, a queer romance author and podcast host, puts Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis and Cat Sebastian’s Star Shipped in this category. “The door is open,” Finch says of the novels, “but the lights are off.”
Some readers will rank a story at two peppers simply if it takes a while to get going. Grace Reilly’s contemporary romance Yes, Chef has at least five plot-relevant sex scenes and some light kink: A character spits in his partner’s mouth. Several readers rated the book four peppers on Instagram, Reilly says, but she recalls others gave it two because the sex doesn’t start until 60 percent of the way through. “I’m never offended,” Reilly says. “But I don’t necessarily agree. It just depends on what else you’ve read.”
Other subjective factors play into this middle ground where two, three, and four-pepper ratings reside. A decade or so ago, a same-sex pairing alone could bump a book into a higher-heat category, recalls Star Shipped author Sebastian. Now, she sees readers making a similar assumption about books with trans characters. “People are mentally adding a pepper,” she says. “I’d like to believe we’ve moved past that as a readership, but I doubt it.”
Daphne, a Canadian Bookstagrammer who works in digital media, gives Heated Rivalry author Rachel Reid’s Tough Guy two peppers compared to Rivalry’s four. Tough Guy is her favorite of the author’s novels. There are fewer sex scenes, but she remembers them all, particularly one involving performance anxiety, something she rarely encounters in romance. “I don’t care about it,” she says of the spice scale. “I just want a good story.”
At three peppers, the bedroom door is almost always fully open, but the lights are still dimmed. Finch says that, at this point, she expects a few sex scenes — or, at least, one or two long ones — and explicit language, though a euphemism may still slip through.
“I think you can start saying cock and cunt when you get to three peppers,” Benoit says. “That’s the line for me.”
Katherine Morgan, the owner of Grand Gesture Books in Portland, Oregon, likes her romances at three peppers, where they’re “spicy as hell, but not too smutty.” Jasmine Guillory novels such as Party of Two and While We Were Dating hit that sweet spot for Morgan: a couple of open-door sex scenes, say, with a fade-to-black encounter for good measure.
Finch puts Sarah MacLean’s 2018 historical romance Wicked and the Wallflower at a three, since there’s little ambiguity about whose hands are where or who orgasms when. “Most romance novels with explicit sex fall here,” she says.
With four peppers, the lights are on. I would put KJ Charles’s Society of Gentlemen trilogy — my favorite queer historical-romance series — here. Finch’s fours include Rachel Reid’s Heated Rivalry and Kennedy Ryan’s 2021 contemporary romance Reel: explicit language, plenty of sex, some variety in what the characters get up to. Oral sex is usually a requirement for Finch to consider a book a four, particularly when one or both characters are women. “Otherwise, it doesn’t make it past three for me,” she says.
What happens before anyone gets into bed can matter just as much as the sex itself. In romantasy, Barros points out, lovers might spend half the book trying to kill each other before finally having sex. Paranormal romance complicates things further: Unfamiliar anatomy requires more description, if only to establish what goes where. “You want to make it sexy,” Daphne says. “Otherwise, you’re just reading about tentacles.”
Lemming’s 2022 self-published romance That Time I Got Drunk and Yeeted a Love Potion at a Werewolf throws magical tentacles into the mix. She considers the book — which was later traditionally published in 2024 — a four on the spice scale, about as hot as she usually writes: some dirty talk, a little BDSM, but “too much plot to be considered a five.”
Since moving into traditional publishing, Lemming says her editor has been asking for more. “She’s always like, ‘We gotta add in some spanking or something,’” she says. “‘This is too blasé a sex scene. Let’s pump it up.’”
One name came up in nearly every conversation I had about the high end of the spice scale: Sierra Simone, whose Priest series makes erotic fodder of religious devotion. Lemming singled out Sinner, Simone’s 2018 romance about a man who falls for a would-be nun, as an obvious five-pepper read. “If there’s anything hotter than a nun being tempted away from the church by a sinner whose only desire is to touch her,” Lemming says, “I don’t know it.”
Personally, I’ve found that novels in the five-pepper range tend to involve elements of taboo or kink. In the spring, I picked up W. H. Lockwood’s then-self-published Doppelbänger, about a man who must have sex with his double from another universe to save the world. (A publisher has since acquired it.) It is every bit as wild as its premise suggests and, at times, genuinely baffling: five peppers, surely.
Benoit and Reilly have noticed a similar pull toward taboo at the higher end of the scale, particularly with dark romance, a subgenre built around forbidden desires, “morally gray” characters, and relationships that might be considered unsettling or problematic outside fiction. Like the Omegaverse — romantic and often erotic fiction organized around biological hierarchies borrowed from outdated ideas about wolf packs — dark romance novels like H. D. Carlton’s Haunting Adeline and Navessa Allen’s Lights Out first built an audience in fandom communities and indie publishing but have since moved into the mainstream.
Anna Cowan’s new novel The Duke, a sapphic romance set in an alternate Napoleonic-era London where women can inherit titles, struck Sebastian as a clear five-pepper title. But when she recommended it to three friends, they all found it tame. “They were like, I think we read a different book,” she recalls. Sebastian had been measuring its heat against other books in the subgenre. “And I think they were coming from a place of like, But nobody was wearing a leash.”
Finch reserves her fifth pepper for books that put a “spotlight on the bed.” In her view, a five-pepper read is “the last stop before erotica,” largely focused on sex but in service of the wider plot. Still, the spice guide display at Hopeless Romantic Books draws no such distinction in its definition of a five-pepper read: “Who needs a plot, anyways? Give me all the smut.”
Production Credits
Photographs by
Tonje Thilesen
Photo Assistant
Laetitia Tamko
Set Design by
Germán Rojas
