Pheromones are chemical scents that animals naturally give off, which influence behavior. If you’ve ever been attracted to someone and didn’t know why maybe your nose was subconsciously guiding you.
Scientists have yet to isolate a chemical scent that turns on humans, but they have found one that is a turn-off. At the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, researchers collected female tears and then had men smell them. Those men were then tested for sexual arousal and testosterone, and both decreased. According to an article in Scientific American, “the tears sent a message that romance was off the table.”
Scientists have been researching pheromones since 1959. They have found them in a wide variety of animals, from moths to dogs to goldfish and lobsters. Even insects, single-celled organisms, and plants have pheromones. Whether humans actually have pheromones is unclear. This hasn’t stopped companies from trying to cash in on them. There are a wide variety of perfumes and colognes that claim to make you irresistible.
Perhaps human culture has evolved beyond primal pheromone drives, or maybe scientists just haven’t looked hard enough. Our sense of smell is complex. Some estimate that humans are capable of telling the difference between 1.7 trillion smells.
Some people have started to hold pheromone parties in Los Angeles and New York. The rules are simple. All guests bring a used T-shirt that they slept in the night before. T-shirts are separated into plastic bags with numbers. Other guests smell the shirts, and if they like what they smell, they have a chance to meet the shirt’s owner. A bar in London has a different take on pheromone parties. Young people wear bags over their heads with a hole for their nose. They then take turns sniffing each other’s anonymous armpits while marking yes or no on a scoresheet. Then participants do another round of sniffing and scorekeeping with bags off. If, in both rounds, a match is made, romance might be in the cards.
Using smelly shirts or smelling armpits to find a romantic partner sounds superficial, but there might be deeper reasons behind the matchmaking power of smell. One experiment has shown that women like the smell of men with DNA that is genetically compatible. Conversely, they dislike the smell of men whose DNA is too similar to their own because they will be more likely to produce children with weaker immune systems.