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Kissing YouTube video goes viral (oh, no, it's an ad)

A video showing many pairs of strangers kissing for the first time fascinates millions -- 25 million, in fact. If only they knew the clip was flogging fashion.

Nice clothes.
Tatiana Pilieva/YouTube; screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET

Here is the lesson from the Web this week: it takes just a couple of days to get 25 million people to pay attention.

All you have to do is show them other people enjoying their first kiss. And, preferably, being slightly embarrassed about it because they're total strangers.

This fine artistic ruse emerged on Monday, courtesy of filmmaker Tatiana Pilieva.

Here were 10 pairs of people meeting for the very first time, locking eyes, and, shortly thereafter, lips.

We sighed in wonderment. Well, not all of us. Some of us were suspicious about the fact that these people were, on the whole, remarkably pretty.

Of course they'd want to kiss each other. Pretty people generally do. In fact, there is evidence that all pretty people ever do is kiss other pretty people.

Moreover, these people seemed to have the casual, well-dressed air of models -- the sort of models you're supposed to believe are real people, but who actually aren't.

And so, once millions and millions stared at this video and marveled at the pairs that had been brought together, some news seeped onto Twitter.

A fashion house called Wren Studio offered a tweet that read, in part, "To celebrate the debut of our Fall 14 collection, we asked 20 strangers to kiss for the first time."

As Wren Studio's founder and creative director, Melissa Coker, told Fashionista: "I emailed a bunch of people I know, through my personal life, through Wren. I tried to be diverse. Some of them are musicians. But the guy with the tattoos, he actually works at Wren."

Business Insider offers that the majority of the featured strangers were "models, actors, and musicians with plenty of experience acting in front of a camera."

Well, indeed. Snogging a stranger on camera is not a simple task. Indeed, snogging a stranger in front of other people without a camera isn't always easy.

Still, I am most impressed by the fact that this is an ad for the fall collection. There is symbolism here.

You see how ahead of their (your) time these fashion people are? They know what you'll be thinking and feeling in six months' time.

What you'll be thinking and feeling right now is whether any of the couples in the video are still together. And why some fashion studio had to spoil your fantasies.

The Web giveth, the Web taketh away.