Grindr Unwrapped Teases Spicy User Trends

Grindr’s annual Unwrapped has arrived, and it plays like a naughty cultural snapshot of queer dating in motion. Using signals from around 15 million monthly users, and tens of thousands of community votes, the app’s year-end review maps out what it was that people were searching for, connecting over and where the heat was burning brightest.

At the top of the list is a hard truth about desire in 2025: “Hung” ranked highest for profile tag searches. For those cosmos-inclined, Scorpio came in as the most-favorited of zodiac signs. The sheer magnitude of it all served as a reminder of the thirst: Grindr users exchanged more than 135 billion chats and 12.8 billion taps throughout the year, making for an average of about 370 million messages and 35 million taps daily.

What Grindr Unwrapped Reveals About Desire in 2025

Grindr’s tag system operates as a kind of shorthand for intent, preference and identity. The dominance of the body-focused term suggests that open descriptors still drive discovery on hookup-oriented platforms. And at the same time, the trend of zodiac favorites suggests a more shallow, personality-driven layer of connection — snappy chemistry checks that help to make a crowded grid feel more navigable.

Digital intimacy scholars have long known that clear labels reduce ambiguity and speed negotiation. Unwrapped’s conclusions fortify that pattern: People, it seems, are still motivated to show off what they want in a handful of impactful sounds. In practice, that means faster matches, fewer mismatches and a feed that reflects how someone would actually filter for attraction.

Global kinks by country: what users are into worldwide

The geographic breakdown is a culinary tour of flavors. Finland tops for nude sharing, showing cultural norms around directness and how they play out in digital behavior. South Korea has the most — we see you with your open relationships, a telling data point as non-monogamy continues to step out into the mainstream. Switzerland is home to the highest concentration of “twinks,” and foot fetishes dominate among Italian users, a glance at how micro-communities thrive even within overarching national cultures.

In the U.S., however, the “daddy” self-identifier is what’s most popular by country, suggesting an entrenched aesthetic within American gay culture of all things dad-bodied and a voracious appetite for age-differential dynamics with them. These trends mirror broader market indicators observed by LGBTQ media watchers who identify identity labels and erotic niches as drivers of engagement.

Cities powering the gaycation: top destinations and trends

London scores the title for most desired “gaycation” destination, matching the city’s broad roster of nightlife, festivals and year-round events. Tokyo, Seattle and Taipei shine for their large numbers of friend searches — a sign that some metros have a welcoming scene where social growth exists side by side with hookups.

The travel angle isn’t coincidental. Queer travelers frequently turn to community apps to sample safety, vibe and venues on the fly — behavior that tourism researchers and L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups have both observed. Grindr’s own pivot into travel content mirrors a demand for hyperlocal advice that traditional guides frequently overlook.

The scale behind the spice: messages, taps, and votes

Aside from its whimsical tags, Unwrapped’s math helps illustrate just how intertwined the app is with everyday life. At 135 billion messages, the platform is a social utility and pulse check for queer folks around the world. It’s also another 12.8 billion taps that show how low-friction gestures power discovery — a virtuous dynamic one mobile UX teams covet because it reduces the barrier to touch.

Community votes — there are more than 32,000 of them per week — layer in crowdsourced taste, mixing quantitative signals (searches, tags and usage) with qualitative sentiment. And it is that hybrid model, one growing remarkably common across platforms, which provides a richer picture of what users say they want and what they do.

Reading between the lines of Grindr’s Unwrapped data

Unwrapped packages desire with the curiosity we’ve come to expect from year-end rundowns, but it also traces how queerness expresses itself across borders. The shift to chat searching suggests a broader change in the way people are using dating apps, which is on par with something Match.com founder Gary Kremen told me recently: that dating apps have increasingly become the infrastructure of our communities, for friendship and dates instead of just hookups.

Privacy advocates have long advised taking care with dating-app data; aggregate, anonymized disclosures like Unwrapped are meant to raise awareness without identifying anyone. Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and digital rights researchers focus on transparency and user control, and Unwrapped’s top-line treatment sits at that comfortable baseline while offering cultural insight.

Bottom line: what Grindr’s 2025 Unwrapped really shows

Grindr’s Unwrapped is more than a hot highlight reel — it’s a living index of how queer people flirt, find friends and pick their next city escape. From “hung” tags to London getaways, the data reveals a community that knows what it wants and isn’t shy about telling you.