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

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.

Great news for us guys!