The Social Coach

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

According to some recent research, it’s possible to predict how attractive a girl will be by looking at individual body parts, such as how big her feet are.

The research involved “morphing” together the faces of women with unusually large feet, then doing the same with women who have small feet. Men were then asked to rate the attractiveness of the women; the face that was formed from the women with small feet was considered much more beautiful.

I found the piece about what women found attractive even more interesting – apparently there were more discrepancies in what the women seemed to want. I’m wondering if this had anything to do with what stage in their menstrual cycles the women were at – another piece of research a few years back found that women will go for different types of men depending on their time of the month. When they’re most fertile, women tend to choose more “masculine” men, who are more likely to provide strong attractive children; when they are at the other end of their cycle they’re more likely to go for the less masculine guy who’s more likely to stick around in the long-term.

Tags: attraction, evolution, science, women

Since working as a dating coach, I love reading anything related to male/female psychology. There was a great article this week about men and women in their attitudes to telling lies – The Science Museum in London recently commissioned a survey and apparently men tell more lies than women. About 50% more in fact.

Personally, I loved the number 1 lies reported for men and women respectively:

• men: “I didn’t have much to drink”
• women: “Nothing’s wrong, I’m fine”

Nothing surprising there, but still pretty funny to have it “proved” by science.

The article did get me thinking about a common theme I notice in men while I’m teaching them how to meet and attract women. Men (or people generally it would seem) are often afraid to express what they are really feeling, either to protect someone else’s feelings or to protect their own ego.

How many times have you met a girl you liked and nothing’s happened because you didn’t do anything about. Not telling a girl you like her, or not inviting her out for a drink is an avoidance which is as much a lie as trying to pretend you don’t like her (which a lot of guys do to). It’s a lie to yourself to protect your ego and avoid rejection.

Next time you meet a girl you like and have a great conversation, before you leave her look her in the eye, smile and say:

“Hey, it’s been great talking with you, you’re really cool. We should go out for a drink together another time.”

You never know, she might just say yes. If you don’t do it, you’re only lying and cheating yourself.

Well, at least according to this research.

Among 1,500 women surveyed by Phones 4U Ltd., 54 per cent said they would be likelier to date a man with an iPhone

Admittedly, it was carried out by a cellphone retailer, so it’s in their interest to try to boost sales so was probably quite a biased survey….