LOS ANGELES — Sniff your way to love? Singles who have attended so-called pheromone parties haven’t ruled it out.
The get-togethers, which have been held in New York and Los Angeles and are planned for other cities, ask guests to submit a slept-in T-shirt that will be smelled by other participants. Then, voila! You can pick your partner based on scent.
The parties started out as an experimental matchmaking fest by a California woman weary of online dating, but it turns out they also have a root in science. Researchers have shown that humans can use scent to sort out genetic combinations that could lead to weaker offspring.
At an art gallery in Los Angeles on a recent night, partygoers huddled around tables covered with plastic freezer bags stuffed with shirts and an index card bearing a number. Once they found one they liked, a photographer snapped a picture of them holding the bag and projected it onto a wall so the shirt’s owner could step forward and meet his or her odor’s admirer.
Konstantin Bakhurin, a 25-year-old neuroscience graduate student, said he bypassed bags that smelled like baby powder, laundry detergent or perfume in search of something more unique: the owner of a distinctive yellow T-shirt whose fragrance he described as “spicy.”
Judith Prays, a web developer who now lives in Atlanta, said she came up with the idea for pheromone parties after she failed to find a match online. Prays said she would date men for a month or so before things soured until she started seeing a man who wasn’t what she was looking for and wound up in a two-year relationship. What she remembered was his smell.
“So I thought, OK, maybe I should be dating based on smell?” Prays said.
Based on research
Studies have shown that people prefer different human scents. Whose smell they prefer is dictated by a set of genes that influence our immune response — which researchers say is nature’s way of preventing inbreeding and preserving genetic adaptations developed over time.
