Red Expendable

http://www.athenainstitute.com/pherodef.html
http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9803/11/pheromones/

Is this for real? Or complete B.S. You mean a man or woman has to do is dous themselves with this and they will get people asking them out on dates?

My friend was telling me about something he saw on tv, CNN maybe?, about study on this.

Any comments?

I was always wondering why some guys attract women, have them falling all over themselves, and why some are just indifferent to others....

callmejay

I'm not a biologist or anything like it, but I've always heard that no human pheremones have been found.

In my experience, women are attracted to men for some pretty standard reasons. Success/power (can be career-type, academic-type, music-type, or pretty much success/power in anything, but not every woman is attracted to every type,) physical size (height, degree of buffness,) confidence (real or fake ) and then maybe general physical (i.e. facial, hair, etc.) attractiveness.

Wyz_sub10

I remember a study that said women's menstral cycles would converge based on spending time together due to pheromones. I've always thought this was bogus and I'm now reading that this study's been challenged.

So who knows?

LLaurieG

(Laurie) Some technical info excerpted from: http://www.cf.ac.uk/biosi/staff/jaco...ry/pherom.html

Definitions
The term pheromone - from the Greek roots of pherin, to transfer, and hormone, to excite - describes a class of chemicals that are communicated between animals of the same species and that elicit stereotyped behavioural or neuroendocrine responses. Some pheromones - called "releaser" pheromones - elicit an immediate response, while others - termed "primer" pheromones - induce long-term changes in behavioural or endocrine state.

Pheromone-induced responses are mediated primarily by the vomeronasal organ (VNO). The VNO, also known as "Jacobson's organ", is part of an accessory olfactory system. It is present in a variety of non-human vertebrates but its existence in the human has been open to question until recently.

Historical Perspective
The VNO was first discovered by Ruysch (1703), a military doctor, in a soldier with a facial wound. The organ was named after Jacobson who published his findings on animals, but not humans, in 1811. Various other investigators have published studies; Potiquet (1891) observed the VNO in 25% of 200 adult humans, Pearlman (1934) described its occurrence in many animals, in human embryos and mentioned that it may be found occasionally in the adult human. (more detail can be found in Moran, Monti-Bloch, Stensaas and Berliner (1994)).


Human pheromones
Numerous studies have been carried out with humans that suggest that axillary odour contains enough chemical differences in its odour profile to allow for discrimination between individuals. It has been hypothesised that at least some of this individual specific odour may be under the control of human leucocyte antigen (HLA) genes - the human homologue of the mouse MHC genes (Preti, Spielman and Wysocki, 1997). Studies have shown that women prefer those male odours that have HLA types different from their own - a preference that was reversed when those women doing the rating were taking oral contraceptives.

Supporting evidence for the existence of individual-specific odour comes from studies in which mothers have identified their own newborn infants from the smell of a previously worn T-shirt (Schaal et al, 1980). In turn, infants prefer breast or axillary pads from their own mothers, distinguishing the odour from other kin (Schaal et al, 1991).

Following the pioneering work on menstrual synchrony by McClintock (1971), Stern and McClintock (1998) have shown that odourless axillary compounds from the armpits of women in the late follicular phase of their menstrual cycles accelerated the preovulatory surge of luteinizing hormone of recipient women and shortened the menstrual cycles. Axillary compounds from the same donors which were collected later in the menstrual cycle (at ovulation) had the opposite effect: they delayed the luteinizing hormone surge of the recipients and lenghtened their menstrual cycle (Stern and McClintock, 1998).
The work by McClintock is very supportive of the existence of a chemical signal in axillary secretion but it does not prove the existence of a functional VNO.

Daisy

My cat, Sheila, went wild for a certain man's armpit smell. It was like catnip to her - she rubbed and rolled in his shirt.

He did have a good, natural smell.

DNAunion

DNAunion: There was just someting on Discovery channel (or possibly, TLC) about this.

The hour-long show was called something like "Science of the Sexes". They spent about 5 minutes demonstrating the affects of human pheromones. They took two identical twins, dressed the same, to a bar. They went into the bathroom together and only one came out at a time. First, the female without the pheromones came out and she got very few men to come up to her. Then she went back into the bathroom and the other twin - doused with pheromones - went out, into the bar. She got more men to come over and talk to her.

PS: One thing my brother brought up was, why use twins? Why not just have one lady do both - first without pheromones and then with? Using two different people - even if identical twins - brings factors other than pheromones into play.