Comments on: Love Stinks: The Truth About Pheromones and Pheremone Parties

By: Lady Grinning Soul

Lady Grinning Soul — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 12:15:20 +0000

That made me laugh so much. I really dislike that it’s perpetuating incorrect ideas about pheremones though; they should just gear it towards smell-lovers (and I might be one of them) and sell it to the fetishists. This party sounds like SO MUCH FUN if you’re into smell, but otherwise it’s just a scam.

By: Jim

Jim — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 06:10:16 +0000

I want your face, Violet. Not on my head. But somewhere. Fuck it–several places. And…. scene.

By: Michael Samadhi

Michael Samadhi — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 13:05:51 +0000

please excuse the typo – the word “hormones” in paragraph 2 should have read – pheromones

By: Michael Samadhi

Michael Samadhi — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 11:56:11 +0000

When I was in my 20′s I dated a lady in her 40′s, a fascinating woman with incredible real life experiences. She’d been one of the first women to summit Denali (Mt McKinley) in Alaska.

In discussing individual’s body odor, we more used the term “body chemistry” rather than hormones, but she was very much of the opinion that an individual’s scent after a good workout offered more to her than just the smell of sweat. Nancy swore that she could predict sexual compatibility based on that “sniff test.”

It would be my understanding that this has little to do with pheromones . . . but everything to do with some other different factors. The stories I’ve read related this to specific genes called the MHC (Major Histocompatibility Complex) that are part of our immune system.

By: Justin

Justin — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 02:00:07 +0000

Pheremones are only short-range anyway, someone would have to get Really close to be affected by them, so a pheremone-containing cologne isn’t going to do you much good, as they fade pretty fast too.

Other body smell does affect attraction though, one long-term partner of mine liked me to shower (of course), but didn’t want me putting on too much scent, she liked my natural body odour to be just present, it turned her on.

By: Thomas Roche

Thomas Roche — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 01:09:09 +0000

@Mario — I’ve heard a bit about those studies, too, though I’ve never looked at the studies themselves. In any event, it’s fascinating to think that maybe to some extent attraction is impacted by immune compatibility. If there’s ever more-or-less definitive data on any part of that, what would be really fascinating would be to look at how/whether same-sex attraction shows any related responses. Really interesting stuff.

And yeah…the “pheromone” label has become to some extent shorthand for “human smell,” which I have no really problem with colloquially, but when it’s used to market a product supposedly based on science…

By: Mario

Mario — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 22:56:09 +0000

I’m sure these pheromone parties are just so much snake oil, but there was an interesting show on PBS a while back about the science of attraction, and it covered smells. (I’m going by memory.) Apparently, our scent gives off an indication of the makeup of our immune systems. Robust offspring are generally created when chemistry of one parent’s immune system is complementary to another. By contrast, if two people had a similar chemistry, their children would generally be less well-off than if their immune systems each had something, or somethings, unique to offer. It seems that this biological phenomenon places a role in attraction, and that it plays more of a role in influencing women than men.

They did a study where they let men work out on a treadmill and then bottled up their sweaty undershirts. They then gave the different shirts to a group of women. The study seemed to demonstrate that when a woman is ovulating, she will find the scent of a man whose immune system’s chemistry complements her own more attractive than the scent of other men. In fact, the study suggested that, generally speaking, women don’t find men’s sweaty scent all that attractive. In the group of women that were shown on the PBS program, when they replicated the study, all of the women complained that they didn’t like the smell of the shirts at all, except for one woman who remarked that the scent on one particular shirt was “not all that bad.” It turned out that, yes, she was ovulating and, yes, the owner of the shirt had an immune system which complemented hers.

There was another interesting part about the scent that women give off when ovulating and how it affects men.