Some necks are good to nuzzle in. Some necks feel like home – or, at least, like you could take them home. But others – well…
It’s one of the great mysteries of the mating game, how two men, with nothing to choose between them in terms of looks or chat-up lines, could have totally different effects on you.
Turns out it’s your nose that picks up on what’s hot. Sex, it transpires, comes down to smell. And we’re not talking DKNY, Gucci or even Old Spice. We’re talking pheromones; chemical messengers released by the skin, that hotwire our brains for passion action. And you won’t even know you’re picking up the scent of sex.
If you’re generally attracted to tall, thin men with a single malt habit, and suddenly you find yourself attracted to a man shaped like Baloo who only drinks whiskey if there’s Coke in it, blame your Jacobson’s organ.
It’s a system of tubes inside your nose, first identified a couple of centuries ago, and thought to be responsible for deciphering molecules it picks up in the air, and relaying information to the brain that dictates sexual preference.
What’s so powerful about smell, is that unlike the obvious stimuli, our response to someone’s pheromones isn’t under rational control. So when Baloo’s pheromone profile matches your sensitivity profile, you’re likely to get fireworks in unexpected places.
What you pick up in men, is a substance known as androstenone, one of the main components in armpit sweat (and, incidentally, also found in truffles, of the kind pigs hunt out).
If you’re conscious of it, you probably perceive it as a musky smell, and for most of the month, you probably dislike it. It’s apparently least offensive when you’re ovulating, suggesting that it’s nature’s way of helping men direct their reproductive moves fruitfully.
Men are similarly ambivalent about women’s smells. Apparently when asked to comment on them objectively and in isolation, men weren’t too keen – but when they were used as an adjunct to photographs of women men had previously rated as “ordinary”, the photographs were, the men suddenly decided, quite attractive. Also, their testosterone levels rocketed.
Perfume manufacturers have been tapping into pheromones since the first bottle was produced: secretions from the nasty bits of animals (musk, ambergris etc) have been enlisted to provide the sexy edge to floral and spicy notes. They’re now chemically reproduced, but the principle is the same: testosterone smells like musk, and we’re as tuned into it as we are to the sound of coins dropping in a bustling shopping mall. Women want to burrow into it; men want to neutralise it. It’s a winner.
Perfumes aside, how do men and women choose one another’s smells?
It’s all about flagging suitable genetic material. It appears women tend to go for the smells of men whose genetic imprint is quite different from their own, suggesting that it’s all about giving the children the best possible set of genes.
All of this suggests that all the hype about pheromone-in-a-bottle to up your attractiveness is a little dangerous: even if it works, what’s to say that the pheromone you buy isn’t going to be the type that attracts men who like to play practical jokes on Big Issue sellers Which doesn’t stop the marketing of a vast range of allegedly pheromone-based products on the Net. One, subtly named “Sex in a Bottle”, claimed that “independent tests” at Oxford University upped the attractiveness of the users by 840%. But so would a couple of vodka shots at that age and stage.
Still, given the potential market, research continues into the production of pheromone-based, customised perfumes. The route smell scientists are now working on will have us wearing an underarm patch to capture our natural smells, which will be analysed, reproduced and added to, to produce an enhanced version of your own skin smell. That’s kind of romantic.
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