Love, Quantified by Heart Rate and App Permissions

Japanese lingerie brand Ravijour has released a bra that won’t unclasp unless you’re experiencing true love. This is an actual product. The clasp connects to an app that reads heart rate and distinguishes the specific arousal pattern of genuine romantic attachment from exercise, anxiety, or general excitement. If the numbers don’t match the profile, nothing happens. The bra stays on. Technology has appointed itself the final authority on your feelings.

The practical failure mode I keep coming back to: what does this device do for someone who’s drunk and wired at 4am at a terrible party, lying on a stranger’s couch with a heart rate that their body would absolutely classify as sincere? The app probably knows. The app is not moved. In some sense this is a sensor-based intervention against bad decisions, which makes it simultaneously clever and profoundly irritating—I’m not sure I want a Bluetooth dongle adjudicating the moment. Then again, I also thought smart light switches were a bad idea, so maybe I’m just behind the curve on surrendering control of things to my phone.