Sniff Me Hard, Babe - Do Bottled Sex Pheromones Work?

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Aug. 27, 1999

By Mary Roach

Scientists who study sex-attractant pheromones are rarely left wanting for cocktail party conversation. They get to drop lines like "So we smeared synthesized rhesus monkey copulins on the chests of 62 married women to see how their husbands would react," and "You can get a male hamster to mount a clay model of a hamster if you treat it with vaginal secretions."

Eventually, at one of those cocktail parties, someone is bound to say, "You know, you'd be a millionaire if you bottled that stuff and sold it for a hundred bucks a pop."

This is pretty much what happened to Winnifred B. Cutler (click for bio). Cutler has a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She did post-doctoral work at Stanford - Cutler also makes a pheromone perfume additive for women, {Athena Pheromone 10:13tm} a bottle of which is sitting on my desk. But before we get to that, a little background.

Human pheromones do exist and, in fact, Cutler was involved in their discovery (click for more on discovery). In 1986, she and Monell researcher George Preti published a paper showing that extract from male underarms has a regulating effect on women's menstrual cycles.

What, then, led Cutler to believe that human pheromones might work as sex attractants? She told me that in the course of one study -- a study co-authored with George Preti -- she noticed that women with female armpit secretions applied to their upper lips experienced an increase in their level of sexual activity. This led her to surmise that something in the armpit secretions was perhaps acting as an attractant on the men in these women's lives.

"That's one of the things we parted company over," says Preti. …Cutler went ahead anyway and cooked up a synthesized pheromone, the very same one that she now sells …. She tested it on a small group of men who added it to their aftershave or cologne and kept track of how often they were dating and having sex. She reports in the February 1998 Archives of Sexual Behavior that significantly more pheromone than placebo users reported having sex more often while using 10X.

For my part, I was impressed with Cutler's product -I bought a vial of Cutler's Athena Pheromone 10:13 (this one's for women) and tried it out for a week. I didn't notice my husband behaving any differently, or any of the men I work around. I did notice that on the first day, strangers I encountered seemed to be looking at me more than usual, ***

I don't doubt that some people have had success with Cutler's pheromones. In my opinion, if you believe that something makes you more attractive -- be that something Pheromone 10-13 or Chanel No. 5 or Boar Mate -- then you will be more attractive. Pheromones have, however, made me much more interesting to talk to at cocktail parties, and that is good enough for me.

 

COMMENT FROM ATHENA INSTITUTE: Both Athena Pheromone 10:13^tm for women and Athena Pheromone 10X^tm for men are cosmetics that can increase your attractiveness to the opposite sex. Neither product is an “aphrodisiac.”