Scents of sexuality

Perfumes, science has discovered, may play a vital role in perpetuating the species. By Nikki Goldstein.

You may think we women are prone to fall in love at first sight, but it may be more correct, biologically, to say we fall in love at first sniff. If the latest science is on the money, and certainly, if the multi-billion-dollar fragrance industry is right, it may not be a good body, a pleasant face or a healthy bank account that attracts us to the opposite sex but rather, his scent.

Intuitively, many of us know that a man’s scent has the power to repel or attract us almost instantly. “Matt was a keen ocean swimmer, and he always had that fresh, salty smell on his skin and hair,” my friend Anna says. “I’m not sure I even liked him at first, but there was something so magnetic about his scent that I couldn’t resist him.” The flipside is also true. “I think I fell in and out of love with Simon in a week,” says Louise. “I loved the way he dressed, and he was very charming, but he wore a sickly fragrance that he adored, and I knew it was all over after that.”

According to Dr Rachel Herz, visiting professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behaviour at Brown University Medical School, Rhode Island USA, researchers recently discovered that scent ranks as the most important predictor for intimacy for women. “More than the way a man looks, the feel of his skin or the sound of his voice, women report that the way a man smells influences whether she will be attracted to him or not,” she says.

The sweet smell of (evolutionary) success

From an evolutionary standpoint, smell is important to the love act because what we perceive as an attractive smell may also be one that leads us to a mate with whom we’ll produce the healthiest offspring. “If you go along with the selfish gene argument, you discover we sniff out mates who have immune systems that complement our own – perhaps they have resistances we don’t – to create biologically stronger individuals,” Rachel explains. “Because childbearing is a risky enterprise for women, it’s very important for her to be able to single out the best possible partner, and she does this primarily with smell.”

Blind writer Helen Keller, whose own sense of smell was so acute she could detect oncoming rain, described our olfactory sense as the “fallen angel of our senses”, because she understood that while we react to smells (the human nose can detect even a few tiny molecules of a pleasant or unpleasant aroma hovering in the air), we don’t always credit smell with its amazing powers of discrimination.

Take, for example a party – the perfect place to pick up a bloke. When you first enter the room and do a quick man-scan, you’ll detect a load of information about your prospective partner, based on a range of what psychologists call ‘non-verbal cues’: his body language; the way he dresses; whether he’s confident or nervous. You may even be able to work out his social status. What’s really interesting is that even though you may superficially fancy the well-built guy with the high-paying job, your sense of smell is sensitive and powerful enough to override all those signals, bypassing reason – so before you know it, you’re getting it on with the daggy IT dude who just happens to light your pheromonal fire.

US poet Walt Whitman once waxed lyrical about his own body odour: “The scent of these armpits, aroma finer than prayer.” While Mr Whitman may have enjoyed his own scent, there’s no guarantee some passing female would share his enthusiasm and be cajoled into bed. That is, perhaps, until he spritzes himself with some fancy cologne...

Rachel Herz’s lab colleagues have discovered something quite fascinating, especially from the point of view of the fragrance industry. It turns out that the human nose can be tricked by fragrance into attraction. “Women are highly susceptible to scents in general, so if a man masks his body odour with a scent she finds attractive, especially at ovulation time when her sense of smell is piqued, she may find herself engaged in the love act before she can assess his true scent,” Rachel explains, adding that fragrance may be one way for men to level the dating playing field (similar to the way we women use make-up and clothes to make ourselves seem more desirable to the opposite sex).

 

The pulling power of pheromones

It’s this understanding – that human odours can be masked by fragrances to entice the opposite sex – that really drives the perfume industry. The reason animal scents such as musk and civet were once used so frequently in perfumery is that they mimicked the scent of human hormones, and made the wearer smell, well, sexy. View any advertisement for perfume and you’ll see a woman, a man, or sometimes both, engaged in some rapturous moment.

The latest fragrance taking Europe by storm is a perfume called Molecule 01, created by German perfumer Geza Schoen. It’s made of one single ingredient, a substance known in the industry as ’Iso E Super’. It’s hardly detectable as a scent but is supposed to have pheromone-like actions, on the wearer and anyone else who comes into their orbit. According to fragrance author Susan Irvine, “It’s highly attractive, like a love potion. Molecule 01 hovers like a stealth bomber over your skin, appearing and disappearing, taking you by surprise. It’s the most exciting thing to happen to fragrance for years.”

Rachel believes it’s not just sex that influences our desire for different fragrances at different times: “Women often use scent to alter mood,” she says. “Our research shows a woman will likely choose a different fragrance when she wants to feel like a seductress than when she gets ready for work in the morning.”

Scent expert Michael Edwards believes fragrance also has cultural significance and is subject to social and fashion trends. “Floral and food scents have dominated the past decade, but we’re just starting to see the emergence of a new trend towards mossy, woody, earthy chypres and more sensuous oriental scents,” he says.

Michael accounts for this trend in several ways: “The trend towards chypres, which are very strong, powerful almost masculine notes may be an indication that this is a phase where women are becoming more sexually aggressive. We saw the same thing happen at the end of the First World War when women became more powerful in the workplace and got the right to vote, and then again in the ‘80s when women were determined to break the glass ceiling in the corporate world.”

Michael also sees the burgeoning trend towards oriental fragrances as a sign that women are becoming more confident with their sexuality. “Orientals are about overt sexuality and expressing sensuality. They’re not comforting like food notes or pretty and soft like floral notes, they’re about passion and a robust desire to seduce and attract the opposite sex,” he says.

Given that women like to smell men (and not the other way around: men prefer to look at women to assess their fitness as partners), why, then, is the fragrance industry so assiduously engaged in selling women’s fragrances to women? Doesn’t that seem counterintuitive? “Not at all,” says Rachel. “As smelling creatures, we women respond positively to scents, whether we wear them ourselves or smell them on others.” Experts such as Rachel and Michael believe that fragrances exert a power over us that is not only pleasurable, potent and profound – but may be important to life itself.

 

Sexy scents: chypres and orientals

Chypre perfumes take their name from the island of Cyprus – Chypre in French – the legendary birthplace of Aphrodite, goddess of love. Chypre is a family of fragrances based on oakmoss, the heart of all chypres, as well as other woody notes such as leather, amber and vetiver. Orientals are generally based on the vanilla note but they get their richness from notes such as sandalwood, patchouli, spice and incense. Both chypres and orientals are sexy, exotic and sensuous fragrances that perfumers consider to have aphrodisiac qualities.

Our love affair with chypres and orientals goes back to the early 20th century, with two Guerlain fragrances: Mitsouko in 1919 and Shalimar in 1925. Created by the house at a time of great social change, and still cherished today, these radical, sexy scents lit the way for almost every modern incarnation of the these two fragrance categories.

Words: Nikki Goldstein. Photography: Steven Chee. Styling: Nadene Duncan. Hair & Make-up: Chris Coonrod.