What does sex appeal smell like?

Deodorant's advertisements have make anything but sense. Sensual women and men, hippos, uber-expensive cars, lights, bunnies, jewels, planes, balloons, gravity immune tits, owls, well trimmed beards, puppies. It's like adding psilocybin into the afternoon soap-operas.

Many brands proudly promote their magic love formulas. According to their ads, these tax-free shop wonders transform you into a sexual machine, adored and and craved by every single person in the planet pheromones that act as an aphrodisiac.

ROAAARRRR, PHEROMONES.

But, Does it make any sense? to begin with, pheromones are substances produced by some living creatures to encourage certain behaviors in individuals of the same species, like when your partner says that "nothing happens", but more chemical and less ambiguous. There's a bunch of different pheromones, of animal and vegetal origin; some, to us, are as effective as as chewing garlic (perhaps, this is the less glamorous metaphor I've ever used in my life).

This, flying hormones have several functions depending on the species: the queen bee uses them to control the other bees, ants mark their paths with them to transport resources or assign tasks and plants use them to scare away potential predators. Anyways, a huge amount of people know them because of the supposed capability that brunette has of setting her hair loose and consequently heating up the room, that fills up of flying particles of dubious existence; as that Mark Wahlberg movie where plants attacked us. Really, someone approved the budget for a movie where plants attack us with a neurotoxic suicide inciting pollen. In his defense, he also approved Batman vs. Superman (some may say that that's even worse).

The idea of "parfums" could influence sexuality went so far that during 1994, a US Army scientist proposed to develop a feminine pheromones bomb, that once detonated in the battlefield would make all the opposing soldiers "love" each other. Great moment to use Theory of Mind here, place ourselves into the scientist's head, absolutely plagued with cliches; assuming that it was a GREAT plan: soldiers deposing their weapons and dancing YMCA as they were captured, more or less. The gay bomb, really. This is not one of my awful jokes, that was the name. FOR THEM IT WAS NO JOKE!!!

A bizarre anecdote that relates sexuality with the nose is one of the friends of that old crazy guy, Freud. A character named Wilhelm Fliess. Phallic as his pal, Willy believed that the nose was a potent sexual organ and that inside it there was a couple of points that represented the genitalia. The thing is that Willy placed his drugs at those supposed points in his patients to check how their mating behavior changed. Anyways, Wilhelm was never able to prove his hypothesis. This didn't stop him from writing a lot about the subject.

We know that, in mammals, pheromones interact with a small "thingie" inside our nose called vomeronasal organ, but in humans this atrophied as prefrontal cortex starting at the 16th week of gestation (around 4 months), and once we grow up, it is so small that it's almost useless. This concurs with the fact that we do not rely on the smelling sense as much as other animals do, even if we have nostrils that look like oxygen smugglers, in humans there's around 600 smell related genes switched "off".

So crazy because, if we do not have the anatophysiologic base to make pheromones work as they should (whatever that is), nothing should happen. But, some researchers at Sweden grabbed men and women's sweat and made other heterosexual and homosexual men and women smell them, as they stuck them into those noisy machines that measure brain activity, and found out that sexual oriented areas of the brain "lit up" (anterior hypothalamus) as they smelled the bodily fluids of the gender they preferred to bang. Another crazy experiment, based in the theory that alcohol makes us more "kinky", they proved that heterosexual males exposed to a fertile woman's shirt drank more alcohol than the ones that were exposed to the placebo shirt (control group).

So, is the deodorant thing true? The scientific community has a divided opinion. A group says that pheromones in humans, suggesting that there's another thing fulfilling the task the vomeronasal organ had in protohumans. Meanwhile, in the other corner, there's the ones that question the methodology of the experiments.

Another example that shows divided conclusion is the menstrual synchronization. Everyone knows a woman that claims having done it at a moment, specially when they live or work together. I never witnessed it, and there's no physiological mechanism that explains it. But there you have those testimonials, and also some blurry evidence, some studies showed that it does happen, others doubt (again) the methods used to research, reduced study groups, effects overestimation and inaccuracy of definition of the term "menstrual synchronization".

What a bunch of annoying scientists! They are all the time bothering people about correctly executing the scientific method and demanding that the results are reproducible in a good quality by re doing the studies elsewhere!

We do not define that when someone walks by you and you like him/her he/she smells good, whatever sets you "on fire", either the "parfum", or that perfect body. Anyways have them or not (the pheromones), have a shower, and quit complaining about your bad luck.

PS: Nothing beats "Old Spice". What fragrance do you prefer to use?