Smell, Attraction, and Pheromones
Smell can have a direct impact on attraction. This is a fact that most individuals know subjectively and perfume and cologne companies know objectively. Scientists have studied the ways in which smells impact attraction for decades. Most of the time, smells are simply emotional anchors that a person has within themselves that psychologically triggers a specific reaction in that recalls a past feeling, memory, or experience. This is why there are so many different types of colognes and perfumes. Each smell can trigger a different reaction in different individuals. This is why some individuals are aroused and drawn to members of the opposite sex that are “wearing” a specific scent.
These scent based attractions have their roots in our most basic of survival instincts. In fact, when researchers move beyond the psychological memory and anchors that specific scents bring to the surface of different individuals they find that there are chemicals and hormones that enter the body intranasally that do not have a scent and yet they have an effect on arousal and attraction.
Pheromones The Unscented Smell of Attraction
Pheromones are unscented chemicals that are naturally produced by the body. These chemicals can signal to other individuals a persons identity, attractiveness, and even sexual receptivity. The pheromones are natures way of evening the playing field, making certain males more attractive to certain females at different times within their ovulation cycles.
Study after study has shown that when pheromones are breathed in through the nasal cavity they have an impact on the way women view men. These studies have used pictures of men, stories of men, and even live men to gauge the impact of the pheromones. Research has proven that with the presence of pheromones, women find men more attractive and more sexually appealing than they did without the presence of pheromones. These studies controlled all outside variables and the overall findings were that the simple presence of pheromones made the majority of the women studied have more feelings of arousal toward the same men that they had been introduced to on a prior occasion. In other words, with the only factor changing in the study was the presence of pheromones, the same men were found to be more sexually appealing to the same women.
The reason for this change in attraction has been attributed to the effect that pheromones have on the hormones within the woman. Pheromones have been proven to have a major impact on ovulation cycles of women. This impact has been studied in several different ways all of which came to the same conclusion, pheromones themselves impact women in different ways at different stages of their ovulation cycle.
Therefore pheromones do affect women in making them more sexually attracted to a man than they were without the presence of pheromones and the amount of this change is regulated by the stage of the menstrual cycle they are in at the time of the study. This then means to the average man that using pheromones to enhance their impact on women is not something that can be targeted toward a single woman unless that man knows the stages of that womans menstrual cycle. But if a man is going to be in the presence of more than one woman, that man will enhance is sexual appeal to the portion of those women that are in the stage of their menstrual cycle where pheromones have the greatest impact.
Pheromones and Species Survival
The conclusion that we can make from the science behind pheromones and their impact on attraction is that pheromones play an important role in the survival of species. They make females of the species increasingly attracted to, even proactively so, those males that are giving off the most pheromones during certain points of their ovulation cycle. As a result of these females being impacted and incited to arousal and proactive seeking of a mate, the pheromone ensures that more females will find themselves pregnant and as a result further perpetuate the species.
This is important to note because pheromones are oftentimes produced within the sweat glands of the male. While the pheromones themselves are odorless, the males that were stronger and more aggressive would sweat more and therefore put off more pheromones for the females to be drawn to. This too served to make certain that even weaker females were incited to seek out aggressively seek out sexual relations with the stronger males of the species in order to have stronger offspring. The fact that the female had to be incited to be more aggressive in the seeking out of the male is because in many pack situations weaker females are kept from the strongest alpha males by stronger females. The presence of pheromones would motivate those weaker females to fight to get to that pheromone producing male in order to ensure that she too would have a chance at strong offspring.
The take away from the recent studies on pheromones is that they do have an impact on the perceived attractiveness of males to females. This attractiveness cannot be targeted to a single female as accurately as it can be targeted to a group of females all of whom are at different stages of ovulation. This is not to say that the studies did not show that females exposed to pheromones on average found the same males more sexually appealing than they did before they were exposed to the pheromones. But that the extent of this impact is modulated by the stage of ovulation each female is at the moments of exposure.
With this said, if a male were attempting to have an impact on a specific female he would likely have varied results over any 28 day period. Whereas if a male were to encounter a group of women, all at different stages of ovulation, that male would have a varied impact on the females within that group. Each of whom would find themselves more attracted to that male than if there were no pheromones present, but the extent of that enhanced attractiveness would vary from individual to individual. Either way, there would be an impact that would favor the male.

