I know I’m not the only one who has noticed the recent obsession with “spice” in books.

BookTok and Bookstagram are full of #SpicyBooks, #SmutTok, spice accounts, and chili-pepper ratings designed to tell readers exactly how explicit a book gets. #SmutTok had already racked up more than 4.4 billion views on TikTok by 2023. A 2024 count put #smut alone at more than 450,000 posts.

The unofficial scale usually goes something like this:

🌶️ One pepper: Little or no explicit sexual content
🌶️🌶️ Two peppers: Some on-page sexual content
🌶️🌶️🌶️ Three peppers: Explicit scenes shown on the page, with no fade to black.
🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Four peppers: Frequent and detailed.
🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Five peppers: Extremely explicit, with sexual content often central to the reading experience.

Personally, I appreciate the information. I really do. But what I want to know is the followig:

Is it hot?

Because spicy and hot are not the same thing

They aren’t the same thing with food, either. You can dump enough chili flakes into a dish to make your eyes water, but that doesn’t mean it tastes good. Heat is one sensation. Flavor is something else entirely. Books work the same way.  A novel can contain five-pepper explicit scenes and still not be hot. Meanwhile, another book can have barely any explicit scenes at all and be almost unbearably hot.

What makes a book hot? A buildup of tension. A look across a room. A hand that stays somewhere half a second too long. Two characters who desperately want each other but have very good reasons not to act on it. That’s heat. And here’s the irony: sometimes adding more spice actually destroys it. Heat thrives on anticipation. On delay. On the character wanting something he or she can’t quite have. Resolve that tension too quickly or too often, and all those explicit scenes become less sexy, not more.

To be clear, I’m not arguing for less sex in books. Sex can reveal character, change a relationship, raise the stakes, or simply be fun to read. I’m arguing that more spice does not automatically equal more heat.

So, what do you do if you like it hot, but not necessarily spicy, like me? I have a proposal: if we’re going to rate spice, we should rate heat too. Plenty of sites already use flames to rate romance novels, but most use them to mean essentially the same thing as peppers: how explicit the book is.

I want to separate the two.

Peppers for spice. Flames for heat.

Here’s my suggested scale:

🔥 One flame: Mild chemistry. A little attraction, but not much tension.
🔥🔥 Two flames: Noticeable chemistry. Some flirting, longing, or charged moments.
🔥🔥🔥 Three flames: Genuinely hot. Strong sexual tension and anticipation.
🔥🔥🔥🔥 Four flames: Very hot. Sustained chemistry, restraint, longing, and serious payoff.
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 Five flames: Scorching. The tension is almost unbearable, whether or not much explicit sex actually happens.

That gives us room for books that are:

🌶️ / 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Almost no explicit sex. Absolutely scorchingly hot. Some examples (my opinion, of course): Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Better Than the Movies by Lynn Painter

Or even;

🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ / 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

Explicit sex and serious heat. Some of my examples: Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence, Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid

This is the kind of information I want before I pick up a book.

So tell me what you think. Am I crazy? Would a flame rating ever work? Are there other readers out there who want five flames without necessarily wanting five peppers?

Or am I destined to keep wading through anatomy lessons in search of heat?