How To Use Scent To Your Advantage

AskMen / Chanel / Frederic Malle / Serge Lutens / YSL 

“If you’ve ever caught a whiff of an ex-girlfriend’s perfume years after you broke up, you’ll know what I mean: You’re somehow transported to an exact moment in time.“

Desire isn’t only about sex appeal. Sure, it is often a factor, but it’s not what drives us to the point of no return. As we discovered from your votes in our Top 99 Most Desirable Women, it is something more intangible than that — a complete package of, yes, looks, but also intelligence, talent and career success. That got us thinking about what’s behind other forms of desire. What attracts us to physical objects, like cars and Apple products? What is it about certain places that stimulates our wanderlust? We explore these questions in our new (free!) iPad app. Download it now.

Were you shortsighted enough to consider the ads featured on a lesser men’s resource, you’d be fooled into thinking that a pheromone spray could transform you from dud to stud with nothing more than a quick spritz. For those who have never come across the term before, pheromones are the chemicals that animals use to attract a partner whenever they need to mate. Animals don’t have to worry about personal grooming, first dates or awkward small talk; they just get a whiff of a mate’s pheromones and the deal is sealed.

We’ve seen pheromones used in the animal kingdom for a variety of reasons: They allow others to follow a food trail, they can mark territory, bond mother to child and even tell female insects where to lay their eggs. There are several different kinds of pheromones, but the ones we’re interested in (perhaps unsurprisingly) are the ones capable of triggering sexual arousal.

The evidence of pheromones in homo sapiens, however, is inconclusive. There are a couple of interesting studies out there that suggest we may very well operate similarly to animals. One study showed that a specific compound in the extract from a woman’s armpit causes other ladies’ menstrual cycles to fall into sync. Similarly, nursing infants are driven by scent molecules to turn to their mother’s breast, rather than just any boob.

These are all good indicators that pheromones may be at work, but scientists haven’t been able to identify the exact chemical barcode for a compound that will elicit sexual behavior quite the same way it does with animals.

We are hugely complex creatures who depend on a whole host of psychological and emotional factors to get our mojo up and running. There are visual clues, quirks, fetishes, scenarios, physical preferences and so on.

But no matter where you stand on the pheromone debate, one thing is guaranteed: As humans, we unconsciously respond to the way other people smell. Always.

Scent conjures emotional memories in a completely involuntary and automatic way. If you’ve ever caught a whiff of an ex-girlfriend’s perfume years after you broke up, you’ll know what I mean: You’re somehow transported to that exact moment in time.

The reason for this is that the olfactory system (which registers smell) is directly wired to the limbic system, the brain’s emotional memory bank, where all the happiness, sorrow, fear, pleasure and anger from our past is stored. Anatomically speaking, the olfactory and limbic systems are neighbors, so the slightest hint of a particular scent can elicit an automatic response in us with very little processing.

Compare this to our sense of touch. You feel something with your hand and the information has to go through a bazillion sensory neurons before the brain can register the message (“the stove is hot,” “the fabric is smooth”). Smell is instant and impactful and affects our behavior in ways we can’t always explain.  

As we grow up, we collect information about scent and retain it all. Much like a hard drive, the human brain can store anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 scent memories. And since our individual experiences of life are so varied, it follows that no one scent is going to work like an aphrodisiac on all women or on all men — another person’s response depends entirely on the emotional filter through which they “decode” a smell. Vanilla might conjure up sensual memories of warmth and safety in one person but remind the next of that time they fell into a diabetic shock.

But there are some notoriously desirable men’s colognes out there that are a surefire bet when it comes to wooing a potential mate. And, while they don’t contain pheromones, they do contain that crucial “animal” quality that’s capable of triggering our deepest, most primitive desires. Next Page >>