Research suggests nearly half (46 percent) of women have cried after sex at some point in their lifetime14 (and
separate research suggests many men have cried after sex as well). Known as postcoital dysphoria, or PCD, this may be due to fluctuations in hormones that occur during and after sex. It may also be due to the intimate nature of sex, which allows people to
express emotions they've been keeping bottled up.
What Do Tears Look Like Under a Microscope?
In a project called "Topography of Tears," photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher used a
microscope to examine what dried human tears look like close up. Over the course of several years, she examined more than 100 tears from herself, volunteers and even a newborn baby, under a microscope.
What resulted was a beautiful collection of strikingly
different images, many resembling large-scale landscapes. Fisher described them as "aerial views of emotion terrain."15 She
told Smithsonian magazine:16
" … Tears are the medium of our most primal language in moments as unrelenting as death, as basic as hunger and as complex as a rite of passage … It's as though each one of our tears carries a microcosm of the
collective human experience, like one drop of an ocean."
As the saying goes, a picture is worth 1,000 words, so to see the photos for yourself, see Rose-Lynn Fisher's website.17What
is perhaps most intriguing is the different forms tears take depending on the emotions behind the. Tears of "laughing till I'm crying," tears of grief, tears of change, onion tears and others all appear remarkably different.