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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
WHIFF of romance is in the air
Pheromone parties deliver fragrant chances at love
Mark J. Terrill / The Associated Press Archives Tegan Artho-Bentz mulls over a funky scent during a pheremone party. (CP)
Mark J. Terrill / The Associated Press Archives Konstantin Bakhurin, center, smells a shirt as Martina Desalvo look on during a pheromone party in Los Angeles. (CP)
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, or so the theory goes.
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 humans can use scent to sort out genetic combinations that could lead to weaker offspring.
At a dimly-lit art gallery in Los Angeles on a recent night, partygoers huddled around several tables covered with plastic freezer bags, each stuffed with a shirt 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 rightful owner could step forward and meet his or her odour's admirer.
Konstantin Bakhurin, a 25-year-old neuroscience graduate student, said he bypassed the bags that smelled like baby powder or perfume in search of something more unique: the owner of a distinctive yellow T-shirt whose fragrance he described as "spicy."
"I think it's probably a bit more pseudoscience," said Bakhurin. "I just kind of came here for kicks to see what would happen."
The parties are a marked contrast to the proliferation of online dating sites, which demand countless details from singles.
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'd date men for a month or so before things soured until she started seeing a man who wasn't what she was looking for. They dated for two years.
And what she remembered was his smell.
"Even when he smelled objectively bad, I thought he smelled really good," the 25-year-old said. "And so I thought, OK, maybe I should be dating based on smell?"
At first, it was an experiment. Prays invited 40 friends to a party in New York and asked them to sleep in a T-shirt for three nights, put it in a plastic bag and freeze it, then bring it to the party. Bags were coded with blue cards for men and pink for women and numbered so the shirts' owners could pinpoint their admirers.
The night was a hit, Prays said, adding half a dozen couples hooked up and one pair formed a relationship. Since then, she has held similar parties in New York and Los Angeles and is planning others for Atlanta, San Francisco and perhaps elsewhere.
Many partygoers chuckled at the idea of finding a match in a smelly T-shirt. But that's not to say science isn't supporting the idea.
Research studies using similar T-shirt experiments have shown people prefer different human scents. But 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.
"Humans can pick up this incredibly small chemical difference with their noses," said Martha McClintock, founder of the Institute for Mind and Biology at the University of Chicago. "It is like an initial screen."
-- The Associated Press
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 26, 2012 C11
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