Youquet was the result of spending too much time trapped on the couch.

In 2023, I (Kris) had a surgery whose after-care instructions were to try not to move around too much. For a couple weeks, I had little to do but watch TV, go online, read, or think.

One of those thoughts, inspired by someone on TV giving yellow roses as a symbol of friendship, was whether flowers might represent individual personality traits, and not just feelings or sentiments. Because if they did, how fascinating would a person be in a picture if that picture weren’t of their face and hair and clothes in front of a nice backdrop, but of their unique dispositions and tendencies depicted as a bouquet of flowers and plants? A bouquet of a person, of you—a Youquet!—would not only acknowledge a person’s insides, I thought, but it would also defy the silly notion we have of personality “flaws.” By using natural elements to represent traits, a Youquet would offer a nearly objective representative image of us as the beautiful sum of our natural parts, whatever they are. Anyway, I got excited by the possibility of reframing how we see ourselves and others and found it hard to stay as still as I was supposed to.

 

As it turned out, flowers did symbolize personality traits. I found a few flower-meanings resources and started taking notes on personality and plant pairings. At some point during the couchbound researching process I got distracted by a Myers-Briggs personality test and took it, then imagined an INFJ-as-flowers mug on someone’s office desk as an efficient message to co-workers wandering past that they would, or would likely not, make an effective team, and I started pairing Myers-Briggs traits with flowers, too.

One of the early people to be as excited as I was about the prospect of using flowers to celebrate the beautiful complexity of a personality was my friend Richard, the “older kid” I’d gotten to know when I was a teenager living a street away from him in the small German town of Neckarsteinach. Richard happened to have gone into professional web design as an adult, so we put my people-as-flowers idea together with his creative and elegant web design, and voilà — Youquet.

I hope you enjoy it,

Kris