Aphrodisiac scents are real. For as long we’ve been living, breathing, smelling and yearning, humans have ground up, choked down, sprayed on and generally doused ourselves in rare and peculiar substances in the hope that we might smell more desirable to the people that we hope to attract. At no other time is the impulse to find pheromone scents stronger than on Valentine's Day.
The Romans scattered their dining tables with rose petals, while Cleopatra covered her floor with roses in the hopes they would help her to woo Mark Antony (I guess it worked… sort of). There’s Oberon’s love potion in a little play called A Midsummer Night's Dream and countless records of the the seductive powers of jasmine, iris, lavender, violet, cloves and chamomile across millennia and all cultures and corners of the world (including the irresistible aroma of Lynx Africa of this fair nation during the early 2000s).
While the exact science behind aphrodisiacs is not quite concrete, pheromone scents still play a hugely important role in the abstract art of attraction. According to research by Avon in collaboration with fragrance house Firmenich, 64 per cent of women in the UK admitted that a partner’s fragrance choice can make them more attractive, while 44 per cent said a bad fragrance choice can dull a romantic spark, while a 2020 Harvard study concluded that scent has a stronger link to memory and nostalgia than any of the other senses. “In an age where it’s becoming more and more difficult to stand out in a crowded market, you must differentiate your brand emotionally and memorably,” it reads.
One of the ways luxury fragrance houses can stand out and develop that oh-so coveted cult status, is to create a scent that contains some of these attraction elements. Creed’s Aventus, a legendary scent that dominates online fragrance forums (they’re a thing), contains a heady mix of allegedly aphrodisiac ingredients: juniper, patchouli, jasmine and vanilla, but the real lure is its signature ingredient: ambergris, which is sourced from sperm whales (yeah, sorry), with the house describing it as a “sweet, animalistic and marine scent that imparts a rich, sumptuous dimension to a perfume."
Elsewhere, Sandalwood has, in a 2006 study by the University of Pennsylvania, been proven to increase arousal when inhaled, meaning that a little spritz of something like Le Labo’s best-selling Santal 33 could be the one thing holding you back. Or you could trust in the power of Pure Science, where clever perfumers have cooked up unique properties specifically designed to compel. One of the most noted being Escentric Molecules, the fragrance house built around an aroma-molecule that does not exist in nature: Iso E Super, which was created in a laboratory at IFF in 1973 and, so says the house, is prized amongst perfumers for its “velvety, cocooning” effect.
“As soon as I smelt Iso E Super, I knew it was something special,” Geza Schoen, the perfumer at Escentric Molecules, told Glamour in a recent article on aphrodisiac scents “That molecule, pure and simple, naked and alone, smelt sublime – it had the power to call people to you, it had a kind of magnetism and I knew that it worked for women just as it worked for men. It grew on me to the point when nothing else additionally would be needed.”
While you might have stopped reading by now to rush out and buy 10 bottles of E Super and book a table at Tiger, Tiger for one this evening, science still hasn’t discovered a proven ‘sex’ pheromone. Speaking to Smithsonian Magazine, George Preti of the Monell Chemical Senses Centre in Philadelphia, said: “That doesn’t mean a human sex pheromone doesn’t exist. It just means we haven’t found one yet.”
It looks like an old school dash of ambergris and patchouli is your best bet for now.
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