Pheromone Deception

It is a scene sometimes seen in movies—a man puts on a scent that turns him irresistibly attractive to a woman. And enterprising marketers have been selling pheromone-laced fragrances that promise exactly that.

A recent paper by an Oxford zoologist, Tristram Wyatt, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, reviewed the studies on pheromone products, and reports that there is no basis to claims by sellers of such products that pheromone science can be deployed for sexual pursuits.

A report in Science News on the paper said, ‘This public view of pheromones has been driven largely by a few popular studies. People stare at stick figures while sniffing scents to see if they can determine the gender of the drawing. Women inhale the smell of sweaty shirts to influence their mate choice. But many of these studies are subject to problems.’

Some of these studies turned out to be faulty because of small sample sizes or an eagerness for a positive result. While the role of pheromones has been validated by studies of many animals, when it comes to humans, we have no idea which the chemicals are that make up pheromones. In his paper, Wyatt claims that there is no evidence for the assumption that the four steroid molecules—androstenone, androstenol, androstadienone and estratetraenol—are human pheromones. He says if advances have to be made in this field, then research must begin from scratch once again and one of the probable leads might come from newborn babies.

The Science article quotes a study by a French team that examined the chemical secretions from breasts of new mothers. ‘The researchers have shown that chemicals produced in glands around the nipple produce increases in mouth motion in newborns, potentially leading to better latching and more effective early breastfeeding attempts between mother and child,’ says the article.

While this is not a sexual response, what it establishes is that there exists a chemical that produces a behavioural response in another human being.

However, even this chemical has not yet been identified. Isolating, producing and marketing chemicals that could elicit a sexual response is a long while away.

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