Giving a colleague an “air kiss” does not amount to sexual harassment, a UK employment judge has ruled.
Judge Perry said the gesture, a trope in the 1990s British comedy Absolutely Fabulous, could not be regarded as “unwanted conduct of a sexual nature”.
The ruling came at the end of the case of a hospitality worker, Jing Jing Chen, who made allegations against a whisky bar and her fellow employees there.
Chen claimed she was sexually harassed by her manager, Paul de Newtown, who, the tribunal heard, hugged her after walking her home following shifts at the Cut Your Wolf Loose whisky bar in Brighton, in the autumn of 2021.
She told the tribunal that as well as hugging her, de Newton kissed her on the neck – but he said he only gave her an air kiss.
Perry said: “On balance, I consider the most likely factual scenario here to be that Mr de Newtown gave the claimant an air kiss after hugging her and that she misinterpreted this as a sexual advance. I consider that Mr de Newtown is likely to be a more accurate witness than the claimant in relation to this incident. I broadly found Mr de Newtown to be an honest and straightforward witness. By contrast, the claimant’s evidence has been inconsistent in a number of ways.”
Turning to the whys and wherefores of an air kiss, Perry, who was sitting in Croydon, south London, said: “I do not consider that an air kiss is unwanted conduct of a sexual nature.” He said Chen’s claims for sexual harassment “fail and are dismissed”.
The dictionary Collins defines the air kiss as “a kissing gesture, especially one directed towards a person’s cheek, made without making physical contact”. It puts the origin of the word as 1985-90.
Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley, who played Edina and Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous, turned the gesture into comedy gold, accompanying it with endearments such as “mwah, mwah, sweetie”.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as “to greet from a distance with a kissing motion of the lips” and gives an example of its usage from the New Yorker: “[Christy] Turlington and her cohort – fellow supermodels like Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, and Carla Bruni – are pictured in a constant state of air-kissing and waving ciao while gallivanting backstage at fashion week or on the set of a photoshoot.”
