Do Pheromone Perfumes Actually Work?

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For years, pheromone perfumes have been praised as an instant life hack for attracting romance. And in a world of dating app horror stories and traumatising situationships, an instant life hack for the perfect partner is just what we need.

The Perfume Shop, who sell a range of pheromone perfumes on their website, describe these perfumes as “fragrances that work with your natural scent and enhance your body’s pheromones, making you more sexually attractive.” Pure Instinct is another popular pheromone perfume brand, who claim that their perfumes and oils “harmonise with your skin’s pH, revealing a scent that’s uniquely yours.”

But do they actually work? And if so, how? To get to the bottom of this, we need to understand what exactly pheromones are first. 

Pheromones, often known as “love chemicals”, are chemical signals that many animals produce in order to attract a mate from the same species. Although humans secrete a number of natural odours, science is still unclear on whether or not we produce or react to pheromones in the same way as other animals, or if we produce them at all. There is currently no conclusive evidence that suggests that humans produce any chemicals that can help us attract a mate. 

So, you’re probably already doubting the credibility of these pheromone perfumes by this point. The way these perfumes apparently work is by mimicking the scent and qualities of human pheromones, but that could be pretty hard to achieve given the fact that those pheromones might not even exist. If we do produce pheromones, they are likely secreted along with our natural body odours.

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This could possibly explain why some women are more attracted to their male partners when they come home from work or the gym and are covered in sweat, although again there’s no real evidence to support this. For this reason, however, pheromone perfumes are usually a combination of essential oils and ingredients including androstenone, androstadienone and estratetraenol, which are naturally found in our sweat and urine. 

Is there any way that pheromone perfumes work for you then? Well, it looks like the only way they might be able to help you become more successful in the world of love is through the placebo effect. This effect happens when you believe a certain treatment or method is working for you, despite there being no scientific evidence to support its effectiveness.

In this case, believing that you are wearing a perfume that automatically makes you more attractive will likely make you feel more confident, and confidence is often a trait that people find very attractive. Although you might believe that this sudden spike in success was caused by synthetic pheromones, it probably just came down to the fact that you approached the situation feeling more confident and self-assured, which will automatically improve any sort of social encounter you have.

So sorry to break your heart, but it looks like we’ve debunked the pheromone perfume myth, no matter how hard we wanted it to be true. If you’ve read this far, then we’ve even destroyed the hope that the placebo effect could’ve given you. However, what you can take from this is that how confident we feel about ourselves has a huge impact on how we navigate the dating world.

You might not have the ability to naturally produce “love chemicals”, but you probably have a killer perfume that makes you feel sexy whenever you put it on. So put it on! Relax in the fact that even though you’re super nervous and maybe feel like you have no idea what you’re doing, you can still smell absolutely mesmerising, so dab on a bit of Dior and put yourself out there!