Want to turn an ordinary dinner date into "incredibly hot sex?

"All you have to do, according YourTango, a love-advice website, is avoid putting perfume on your neck, breasts, or genitals, because that "hides the important pheromones that drive men wild." Last year, Cosmopolitan—another go-to source for medically oriented dating strategies—suggested you go panty-free so that the "odors in your pheromones—that natural chemical you emit that attracts men—may more easily waft into the air to be picked up subliminally by the primitive part of his brain." If only it were so. Pheromones, in scientific parlance, are aromatic chemicals emitted by one member of a species that affect another member of the same species, either by altering its hormones or by compelling it to change its behavior. When they work, they are truly bewitching. For instance, when a female silkworm moth wants to get her guy, she sprays a chemical called bombykol from her abdominal gland and her targeted male transforms into a sex slave, trailing the scent until he mounts her. It's an enviable feat. Still, it's a big leap to extrapolate from bugs to people—or even to lab mice, for that matter. No scientific study has ever proven conclusively that mammals have pheromones. "The whole pheromone thing got picked up by the mass media," says Richard Doty, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Smell and Taste Research Center and author of The Great Pheromone Myth. It feeds into our need to believe, he said, that there "is all this subliminal stuff going on that is affecting us—who we mate with, who we want to be with. It's this mythical perspective." And marketers, like women's magazines, are only too happy to exploit that myth. That's how a whole junk-science industry of pheromone-perfumes, pheromone-soaps, and pheromone-cosmetics managed to spring up from a strange menagerie of misconstrued mammal studies."
via Slate /By Randi Hutter Epstein / continue reading