There’s a whole industry selling pheromone sprays for men, claiming they’ll help you to attract the woman of your dreams. Even in mainstream media, adverts by companies like Lynx suggest that if you use their deodorant, women will be flocking towards you as if you were Bradd Pitt or George Clooney. Is there anything to actually back any of this up? Do pheromone sprays really work?

I just attended a talk by Dr Peter Brennan, a physiologist from Bristol University who has spent a long while researching and studying this. It was interesting stuff but the bad news is, if you’re hoping a spray will be the solution to success with women, there’s little research to back that up.

The summary of the facts that we know are:

• Some animals do rely largely on pheromones to attract the opposite sex (mice for instance)
• In humans, we simply don’t have the same “receptors” for pheromones (in other words, it doesn’t work for us, although there’s evidence that it might have done thousands of years ago
• Human sense of smell has declined over hundreds and thousands of years, to be replaced by visual and verbal clues of attractiveness
• There is no good scientific basis that pheromone sprays work
• The placebo effect may have some influence (in other words, if you spray youself and believe it makes you more attractive, you might act more attractively

Sorry if you were hopeful….

The same evening saw some good talks from other psychologists and biologists about what men and women look for in a partner, which pretty much back up what I’ve written previously. Guys tend to find physical attributes attractive in women, whereas women are more concerned with behavioural and status traits. The good news for you, are these are things you can learn (don’t forget, if you’re in London you an hire me as a dating coach to find out how.)

photo by alex555

Tags: attracting women, attraction, evolution, female psychology, meeting women, pheromones, science

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| Comments (0) | July 13th, 2010