Next time you’re on a cruise and you spot these signs on someone’s cabin door, you’ll know they have a very NSFW meaning.
Luckily for you, a woman who’s worked onboard cruise ships for a decade is spilling the tea.
Cruising as Crew, aka Lucy Southerton who runs a YouTube channel dedicated to her experiences on cruise ships.
And she says that if you spot these signs on someone’s door, it means they’re swingers hoping to mingle.
Lucy explained that it’s becoming more popular for swingers to go on the hunt for other like-minded people on cruises.
She said: “I think it might be easier to find other people who like to swing because it’s an enclosed population of people on a cruise ship. But how do you find a couple that want to swing? What do you look for?”
Particularly when it comes to giving out signs to other people, there’s a whole culture involved in swapping partners on cruises that you didn’t know about, and door signs is one of them.
The upside-down pineapple
She explained: “Well, as I’m sure we all know by now, there is the upside-down pineapple, and this can be in any form. Some people put the upside-down pineapple on their cabin door.”
Or, if that’s too flashing, ‘some people wear an upside-down pineapple like a hat or a brooch’ to subtly share their interests.
Then, there’s people who do something different which is pretty hard to see if you don’t know what you’re looking for, and it’s even more difficult to know if they actually mean it as a sign they’re looking to swing.
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A black ring on the right hand
She said: “The other one that I’ve heard, there’s a black ring on your right hand, but that’s a little bit more inconspicuous.
“You can never really be sure whether that’s just something they like to wear or if it’s a signal.”
Three gender signs
The last sign she says is a swingers’ universal sign is ‘male and female signs with a third sign in there’, or ‘three gender signs’.
According to her, if you find any of ‘these three things, you’ve found a swinger’.
The more you know.
As to how Lucy came by this knowledge… well, it was pretty awkward.
She recalled working in the spa on a cruise ship and asking a couple who came in for a massage about their matching silver upside down pineapple necklaces.
She recalls asking them: “Why the pineapple? Like, what does it represent to you in your relationship?”
Since she and the couple had built up a ‘rapport’, they ‘burst out laughing’ and came clean about the necklaces’ true meaning.
Lucy said: “[Back] then, there weren’t really and YouTube videos or anything about it. So it was very much like, if you know, you know.”
