Is Love in the Air? The Science of Pheromones

There is an abundant and unfortunate market based on trying to attract other people. “Pickup artists” have playbooks and podcasts and supplements. A popular product you might see advertised in these circles are pheromone-based colognes or perfumes . A pheromone  is a chemical that is externalized by one organism and processed by another member of the same species to evoke a response. But colloquially, pheromones are almost thought of as love potions. Do these advertisers have a point? Moths have been shown to use pheromones to track and reach potential mates almost 30 miles away. Here is the thing, though: humans are not moths. As a matter of fact, there is actually no proof that humans even have pheromones.

This might come as a huge surprise, but pheromones are much more common in insects than mammals, and evidence of pheromones in humans is controversial at best. Also important to note in the species that assuredly do have them, pheromones have varied functions that go beyond sexual attraction. For instance, queen bees use pheromones to convey roles to the worker bees in the colony.

Some have alleged that pheromones are detected via the vomeronasal organ (VNO) in mammals. However, it is widely thought  that humans do not possess a functional VNO. Meaning, we likely don’t have the necessary component to detect and respond to pheromones even if they were present. Moreover, no compound has been identified  as a human pheromone to date—not a single one.

So where do these notions of human pheromones leading to sexual conquest originate from? There are some studies about olfactory cues (smells) that could be seen as having pheromone-like properties in the ways they elicit behavior. In one oft-quoted study , for example, women were shown to be attracted to particular men based on the smell of a T-shirt they wore (un-deodorized) for two nights. However, there are an important couple of caveats here. First, olfactory cues are not necessarily the same thing as pheromones. Second, these studies have largely consisted of subtle effects in small groups  and the replication of these results (repeated similar outcomes from the subsequent experiments) can be hard to come by.

Now you might be asking, do humans have pheromone-like functionalities or not? Well, the full answer is we do not know. The evidence is really controversial, and no compound has been identified solidly as a human pheromone. Thus, don’t feel compelled to buy those “pheromone-based” colognes and perfumes, and rest assured, this Valentine’s Day, you may wear deodorant and still find a mate.