Plant Pheromones Used in Perfumes

The ancient Greeks (and many other ancient cultures) routinely used plant oils for both medical and cosmetic purposes. In the 1930's a French chemist, Rene Maurice Gattefosse, discovered the benefits of lavender oil when treating a burn on his hand. This started his research on the use of essential oils and Gattefosse later published the first modern book on the uses of essential oils.

Plants use chemicals to attract bees and other pollinators to their flowers. Some plant pheromones have similar chemistry to animal pheromones. Musk is a strong pheromone from musk deer, musk ducks, musky moles, muskrats, musk ox and musk beetles. But similar pheromones exist in musk melons, musk hyacinths, musk cherries, musk thistle,  musk rose, musk plums and musk wood.

The truffles prized by French gourmets as aphrodisiacs are a fungi that has an odor nearly identical to androstenol, a sex attractant for pigs and very similar to chemicals that act as sex attractants in humans.

Perfumes arose from plant oils with smells similar to animal pheromones. Plant oils with the strongest similarity to human sexual pheromones are from jasmine, ylang ylang and patchouli.

Our exclusive Pheromone and Deer Musk: This pheromone contains plant extracts with chemicals very similar to deer musk. It was developed during a search for mood enhancers that would improve inter-personal feelings, but it is not an aphrodisiac. Like jasmine or ylang ylang, it seems to generate positive feelings and increased bonding. Users say it increases friendliness, warmth, affability, fondness, pleasantness, geniality charm, affection and sociability.

Why Expensive Perfumes Do Not Work

Studies by Alan Hirsch and Jason Gruss (Smell and Taste Treatment Research Foundation, Chicago, Illinois and University of Michigan) found that expensive perfumes are much less effective than many essential oils and common foods. They studied the effects of many different scents on sexual arousal of males and females by comparing their blood flow in sexual-aroused tissues (penile or clitoral blood flow) while wearing scented masks and while wearing non odorized, blank masks. Expensive perfumes increased blood flow by only 3%. In contrast the combined odor of lavender and pumpkin produced a 40% increase and many other scents worked better than perfumes.

While these results are for men, the researchers reported that women also responded poorly to expensive perfumes. These scientists tested lavender which has a reputation as a mild attractant, but they unfortunately did not test many other pheromones with reputations as bonding smells such as ylang ylang, Asian oud and others.

Hirsch postulates that scents may act by on the brain (1) by reducing anxiety, which inhibits natural sexual desire, or (2) increasing alertness and awareness, making the subjects more aware of sexual cues in the environment around them, or (3) by acting directly to the septal nuclei, a portion of the brain that induces sexual arousal.
 

Why Expensive Perfumes Fail

The key to using pheromones and scents is to put them into contact with large areas of your body. Then the heat of your body biochemically alters the odors and blends them into your overall pheromone signature.

Your personal pheromone "odor signature" is a complex mixture of pheromones, body oils and fatty acids, sweat, and hormones such as androsterone secreted onto the skin from your apocrine glands. In addition, the 40 million skin cells that you shed each day add to your pheromone signature.

Perfumes that are dabbed on a small area - such as the wrist - do not effectively mix into your overall pheromone signature. Thus, they exist as a separate smell and do little to change your total pheromone signature. Furthermore, the mixing of many different scents in perfumes produces a confusing pheromone signal.
 
 

"After the final 'No' there comes a 'Yes'
And on that 'Yes' the future world depends."
              Wallace Stevens
 
 Why Mothers Kiss Babies - Pheromone ID Swapping

While the effects of pheromones on humans are less obvious than in other mammals, they still strongly affect our behavior. Many pheromones are air borne particles that pass through air after evaporation by the heat of the body. Some pheromones are heavy proteins that cannot be passed through the air by evaporation. These are passed by physical contact such as by kissing or skin-to-skin contact. Kissing occurs in all human cultures and is a way of passing identification pheromones. When a mother kisses her baby, this increases the mother-baby bonding.

Pheromones act in two ways. The first is "signal pheromones" that cause others to become aware of your presence and cause immediate changes in behavior by activating certain areas of the brain. The second way is "priming pheromones" which trigger increases in GnRH production and which often require kissing or skin-to-skin contact. This in turn, increases production of many hormones that affect development, metabolism, and mating behavior. Often, fertile women have difficulty becoming pregnant. In married couples it takes on average six months of sexual intercourse to produce the first pregnancy. One theory is that the woman's body is slowly adjusting to her husband's pheromones before becoming receptive to pregnancy.

Pheromones activate pre-coded genetic programs. The increased production of GnRH (Gonadotropin Releasing Hormone) starts the pulses and cycles of sex hormones which govern sexual development. GnRH also affects activity in the brain that affects sexual development and behavior.

Pheromones Attraction More Powerful Than Physical Strength in Animals

In goats, sheep, and pigs, male dominance in competition for females is determined by the strength of the male's pheromone - and not physical strength or beauty. The animals with the strongest pheromones have more confident threat displays without giving signals of fear. This reduces the incidence of actual physical combat for females - especially among deer and moose. The pheromones of the male with the strongest pheromone causes a psychological castration of other males which helps remove them from competition. In pigs, the pheromone androstenone triggers the female's receptivity to the male.

This type of pheromone dominance may also apply to humans since many researchers think human pheromone responses are very similar to pigs (Hard on our ego but probably true.) Truffles, which are a fungus that grows underground near oak trees in France and Italy, are highly valued as human aphrodisiacs. Pigs also are passionately attracted to truffles and are used to locate the truffles. So if you are a man, your pheromone smell may affect females more strongly than your good looks, money, or wit.

Why Women Call Men Pigs

Women often call men pigs (or vertical pigs). On the other hand, men very rarely use this term when talking about women. Since the domestication of wild pigs 7,000 years ago, women have intuitively known that many male human hormones are very similar to those of pigs.

The key pheromone in pigs is androstenone, which gives the characteristic odor to urine from boars (male pig) and some of the odor to human male urine also. Female pigs are extremely aware of the smell of androstenone as are human females to male smells. Pig breeders spray androstenone from aerosol cans on the backs of female pigs to determine whether the female is ready for breeding - if the sow arches her back, she is sexually receptive.

Nipple Pheromone - Why Men are Attracted to Large Breasted Women

Newborn infants follow the breast odors emanating from their mother's nipple/areola region. These odors exert a pheromone effect that guides the infant to nurse at their nipples. (Winberg and Porter 1998, Porter and Weinberg 1999) Within minutes after birth, the mother's breast odors cause a head turning of the baby for the nipple and helps guide the baby to successful sucking for milk. Newborns soon learn to recognize their own mother's unique odor signature which builds mother-infant attachment.

Nipple pheromones also may explain a lot of behavior in young men. The irrational obsession of men with women's breasts has long been a puzzle. It may be that this is a natural bonding pheromone that men require for their emotional stability and helps tie them to women.

This is the reason that men are instinctively attracted to large breasted women.

Pheromones and 1,500 Human Genes for Smell

Interpersonal attractive pheromones are the air-borne pheromones which often have a distinct smell. Smells and our response to them are extremely important to proper body functioning. A very significant part of the human genome (about 5.0% or about 1,500 genes of our 30,000 human genes) is used to code the receptors of smell. Two anatomically distinct organs respond to smell, the olfactory system located in the upper part of the nasal cavity, and the vomero-nasal organ or VMO in the nasal septum.

Even though human interactions are more complex than other warm-blooded animals, odors and pheromones still influence attraction and bonding. The wiring of the brain in humans and other animals sends signals from smells directly from the nose to the limbic area of the brain where our deeply felt emotions reside.
 
 
 
 
 

"When we smell another's body,
it is that body that we are breathing
in through our mouth and nose,
that we possess instantly,
as it were in its most secret
substance, its own nature.
Once inhaled, the smell is
the fusion of the other's
body and my own."
-Jean-Paul Sartre
 
 
 

Insufficient Pheromones - Inadequate Emotions

A lack of smell limits emotional attachment. Approximately 1.3% of persons are born with a total lack of smell or Anosmia. And most of us lack the ability to smell certain fragrances. A study found 5 to 8% of students at Oxford University could not smell freesia, a very fragrant flower.

Persons with Anosmia often complain about a lack of libido. While they may marry, behavior that is emotionally distant remains a problem. Some researchers have noted that the decline in sex drive with aging coincides with the decline in smell.

One answer to reduction in the ability of smelling as we get older is to increase our pheromone signal with essential oils and pheromones.

Pheromones Act Even If You Cannot Smell Them

While many pheromones have distinct smells, one may be influenced by a small amount of a pheromone which is not enough to create a conscious odor. Male dogs can respond to pheromones from a female dog at distances up to three miles and at concentration that the dogs are unlikely to consciously smell.

Women often like to wear unwashed T-shirts previously worn by men. In the Middle Ages, a man would wipe his brow after dancing and present it to his lady as a love token. The reason for this behavior may not have even been consciously realized but it meant that the lady would have her man's smell with her. In Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, Othello goes into a rage over one of his missing handkerchiefs. The wives of Welsh miners working on night shifts would put their man's nightshirts in their pillows where they could smell them.

Humans also respond to pheromone levels that are too low to smell. Sobel and colleagues (Stanford University) found that a air-borne fragrant pheromone (oestra- 1,3,5(10),16-tetraen-3yl acetate) would activate brain centers even when present at concentrations below a threshold of conscious detection. Sobel used Magnetic Resonance techniques to prove that exposure to pheromones (at undetectable levels) activate brain centers. Even when the experimental subjects could not smell the chemical, their brain centers that respond to the pheromone, were activated. (Sobel et al 1999). Other studies of brain EEG patterns of behavioral evidence have also come to the same conclusion: that we can be strongly affected by pheromones that we are not even conscious of smelling.
 

Smells Directly Affect the Emotional Center of Your Brain

Smells activate nerves in the vomero-nasal organ or VMO in the nasal septum  that act directly on the brain's emotional control areas. All other senses such as sight, touch, sound, temperature are transferred through a series of nerve connections that change and moderate the effects so that the brain does not over-react to new stimuli.

However, the nerves that respond to smell are wired directly into the brain and the stimuli are sent pure and unmodified to the limbic center of the brain. There are three general areas of the brain, the first and most basic is the brain stem which controls basic functions such as breathing and heartbeat. The next higher area is the limbic system in the central area of the brain. The limbic system is where emotional responses are concentrated. When various areas of the limbic system are activated, a person feels intense emotions. Some limbic areas cause feelings of peace, contentment, attraction while others areas causes feeling of anger, rage, hostility, loneliness and so on. The conscious brain is the topmost and outer area of our brain. This is where we spend our time thinking but the conscious mind is not where our emotions are developed. Why we love someone is more how they smell to the limbic system than what we consciously think.

In rats, surgical ablation of the vomero-nasal organ or VMO in the nasal septum produces dramatic impairments of  mating, dominance status, and gender recognition.
 

"I will be arriving in Paris tomorrow evening.
Don't wash!"
Napoleon - Message to Josephine
 

Washing, Cultures and the Decline of Bonding

Numerous scientists have observed that as cultures advance to higher levels of bathing, interpersonal bonding seems to decline. They suggest that the washing removes skin pheromones and weakens the interpersonal bonding in families and between couples.

In the Roman Republic, family ties were very strong. However, as it evolved into the wealthy Roman Empire with its adequate water supplies and free municipal baths, personal bonds became weaker, divorce became common, and social disorganization increased. With the rise of Christianity, with its dislike of nudity and bathing, family ties began to strengthen. It is said that few people bathed for the next 1,500 years in Western Europe.

In North Africa and the Middle East, where Islam prevailed after the collapse of classical Roman culture, a somewhat different scenario occurred. Musk, a strong pheromone obtained from the male musk deer, was a special favorite of the Prophet Mohammed. The El Ktab, a classic Islamic text, describes musk as "the noblest of perfumes and that which provokes men and women to venery". Islamic culture always emphasized the use of perfumes and pheromones. (Kohl and Franceour 1995).

"The Lonely Crowd" - Cleanliness Can Produce Loneliness

In the United States, California led the way on personal cleanliness. By the 1940's, many Californians bathed or showered daily and washed away their personal pheromones, while most of the USA stuck to weekly bathing. However, California soon led the USA in divorce rates and family breakdown. Likewise in Europe, Scandinavia led the way in personal cleanliness in the 20th century and soon experienced family breakdown and chronic cultural complaints of interpersonal coldness and a lack of bonding. Immense social programs, prosperous economies, and a basic friendliness of people both in California and Scandinavia have not solved these problems.

While many social historians would disagree that a lack of pheromone could cause family breakdown, there are other precedents where chemical changes may have altered history. The poor leadership of the upper classes in the Roman Empire may have been influenced by chronic lead poisoning . Wealthy people use lead cooking pots and the bones of wealthy ancient Romans often have lead concentrations 100 times the level that causes brain dysfunction.

Anyway, I am about to order some more, but I have a question: Do you sell the SB 74 ingredient by itself? I would like to add it to another cologne that I often use, and like (and it seems to like me).

Thanks for your response.

K @kairios.com

Skin Biology Response - The pure SB-74 (the name given our exclusive Pheromone) can be irritating on the skin. But we have developed a concentrated body perfume body using this pheromone and other of the pheromone-like essential oils - CLICK HERE: Choose "Pheromone Only" Scent.

Just wondering if any of you have noticed people noticing you/treating you differently when you wear these oils? Does the pheromone act the same way (closeness and bonding) in the breast cream as in the oils?

Athena

I got the Jasmine scented one with the pheromones. It's not oily at all...it goes on, a little goes a long way..and soaks right in. I put it on my neck and shoulders...and not 2 minutes later my husband was kissing my neck...he seemed not to feel like it was too oily or anything, so it must sink in. ;-)

Lruthe

Cayenpepp

Skin Biology Response - "SB-74" was the name given our exclusive Pheromone.

J.M. @aol.com

Skin Biology - Most women like Patchouli and most men do not - but there are many exceptions.

BW @hotmail.com

I've been using the Calypso's Oil (either the Jasmine or the Stealth version, before company meetings with male executives). Normally they just sit around and criticize or try to dismiss - in one way or another - everything I present at the meetings. Now that I use the oil, they very often just agree with me. Their aggression level (rudeness) seems to drop when I have a Calypso's Oil on.

I will just keep this method secret.

G.K.
New York City

My male cat sure likes me with Ylang Ylang. But things are fine with the other (human) male in my life also.

S.M.
California

There is no doubt in my mind that Calypso's Oil works. People are friendlier and talk more to me when I'm around them. My boyfriend likes the way I smell and that is a real step forward. Sometimes I also spread the oil on my feet and legs to let its fragrance diffuse upward. I learned this trick from an old French perfumer.

R.B.
California

I tried the Calypso's Oil sample and was amazed at the number of people who either talked to me or told me how well I smelled. Now I want to order 8 ounce bottles of the Sandalwood, Ylang Ylang, plus a bottle of just the pheromone SB-74 in the oil.

L.
California

Skin Biology Response - "SB-74" was the name given our exclusive Pheromone.

I am really sold on Calypso's Oil. I had a first date with a new girlfriend so I followed your instructions and after my shower, I rubbed a small amount of oil (Jasmine and SB-74) over my chest.

I said nothing to my new friend about the oil, but in my apartment she keep telling how great I smelled and asked where I got that great cologne. She said she really loved the smell and aroma.

Anyway, it was a perfect start for a first date.

D.D.
Washington State

Skin Biology - One month later the writer comments, "We are still going together."

I tried the Calypso's Oil with the ylang ylang, nutmeg, and SB-74. I rubbed the oil on my upper body and breasts in the morning, then went about my usual day. I was amazed at the number of men who started friendly conversations with me.

It great!

F. H.
Washington State

Skin Biology Response - "SB-74" was the name given our exclusive Pheromone.

My wife and I have tried your oils, the jasmine one and the ylang ylang oil. Both have really been great for us and really bring out some wonderful and unexpected emotions.

H.P.
Washington State

I love the smell of Calypso's Oil and it really helps my chronically dry skin. I use P&R Body Lotion for a week on the dry areas and Calypso's Oil the other days of the week. These is really helping me to live with our harsh winter climate in Toronto.

L.C.
........@aol.com

I am 60 and the oil is working better than Viagra for me. I prefer the oils with ylang ylang and the jasmine. My wife agrees.

R.S.
Washington State

Cohn 1994 - Cohn BA, In search of human skin pheromones. Arch Dermatol 1994 Aug;130(8):1048-51

Kohl and Franceour 1995 - Kohl JV and Franceour RT, The Scent of Eros (Continuum Publishing) 1995. This is an very excellent book for the general public on pheromones and behavior.

Nicoli and Nicoli 1995 - Nicoli RM; Nicoli JM, Biochimie de l'Eros,  Contracept Fertil Sex 1995 Feb;23(2):137-44

Porter and Weinberg 1999 -  Porter RH; Winberg J, Unique salience of maternal breast odors for
newborn infants. Neurosci Biobehav Rev 1999;23(3):439-49

Singer 1991 - Singer AG, A chemistry of mammalian pheromones, J Steroid Biochem Mol Biol 1991Oct;39(4B):627-32

Sobel et al 1999 - Sobel N; Prabhakaran V; Hartley CA; Desmond JE;Glover GH; Sullivan EV; Gabrieli JD, Blind smell: brain activation induced by an undetected air-borne chemical. Brain 1999 Feb;122 ( Pt 2):209-17

Weinberg and Porter 1998  - Winberg J; Porter RH Olfaction and human neonatal behavior: clinical implications.  Acta Paediatr 1998 Jan;87(1):6-10