For a long time we all talked about sexual orientation in the terms defined in Alfred Kinsey’s 1948 book Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male. Kinsey used a scale of 0 to 6, from heterosexual to homosexual with 5 shades of grey.

In recent years we’ve also started talking about sexual orientation in terms of attraction, from the asexual aromantic who feels no sexual or romantic attraction to the hyper sexual who is wholly focused on the sex.

So, that gives you two scales, orientation and attraction, and the result has popped up on Reddit as the Purple-Red Scale of Attraction. There are 42 combinations (7 of them are Aromantic Asexual).

That doesn’t even account for more fluid definitions of gender, which CNN reports has expanded to 20 options on OKCupid and is customisable (including pronouns) on Facebook. It also doesn’t account for kink roles, so you can imagine how many thousand different combinations there are.

If you need to put yourself in a box for a profile or to explain your sexual orientation to someone, there are a lot of boxes to choose from in the Purple-Red Scale of Attraction to start you off.