From a review of the book The Scent of Desire by Rachel Herz, in the Washington Post, 10/28/2007.

Sex would be diminished without our sense of smell. It's not perfume and aftershave that get us--it's the way we ourselves smell. Just as other animals sniff to check each other out, most of us recognize body smell without being aware of the process. Our own cheek-to-cheek social kiss may be a remnant of the sniff greeting.

Herz explains the genetic coding of our immune systems ("MHC"), which is externally manifested by body odor. Since each person's MHC genes are unique, like a fingerprint, body odor is also one of a kind. We are attracted to mates whose MHC differs most from our own, offering us the best range of genes for our mutual offspring.

In a classic experiment, men slept in cotton t-shirts for two nights. Women smelled the t-shirts and rated them for sexiness and pleasantness. The women consistently ranked shirts from men whose genes differed most from their own as the best.

Just as other animals sniff to check each other out, ....

Geez, I don't know, Fraggle. The last time I tried to sniff a woman, she and some of her girlfriends at the bar beat the shit outta' me! :D

I get the feeling that, with all of the colognes and perfumes and body soaps and body oils and skin creams and .....that women don't want us to smell them.

Baron Max

Geez, I don't know, Fraggle. The last time I tried to sniff a woman, she and some of her girlfriends at the bar beat the shit outta' me! :D

I get the feeling that, with all of the colognes and perfumes and body soaps and body oils and skin creams and .....that women don't want us to smell them.

Baron Max

you would still pick up on pheremones you just don't know that is what your acting upon

you would still pick up on pheremones you just don't know that is what your acting upon

And how do you know how good my sense of smell is??

Baron Max

And how do you know how good my sense of smell is??

Baron Max

you never know that you smell pheremones its like when you get a hunch about what someone is going to do or a feeling its your reacting to pheremones and other signals that we just automaticly interpet

The thing I like to smell is their purses where their wallets are kept, I enjoy


smelling their money. I'm certain they enjoy spending mine! :D

I have an ex-girlfriend who has recently become a very good friend (okay, so I should stop disrespecting the woman by calling her my "ex-girlfriend"; she's married and recently had her second child a few weeks ago!!). When we were together (in 2002) she never used perfume. The weird thing is, she had this strong musky smell which seemingly only I could sense.

It wasn't particularly bad or sweet, but I certainly had a reaction to it, especially since I was the only one who could sense it. It seemed to get stronger when she was menstruating, so I figured it wasn't related to being sexually receptive (since that would peak a week BEFORE menstruation, according to my teenage knowledge of endocrenology and sexuality). Now here's the interesting part: I found out later that I could also sense it in her sister, so I guess I was just smelling something in their genes?

Another thing I learnt from our short time together is that YOU SHOULD WAIT TILL YOU'VE LEFT SCHOOL BEFORE HAVING SEX! Follow my advice, kids -- uncle Zyxoas had to learn this the hard way...

.....The women consistently ranked shirts from men whose genes differed most from their own as the best.

Natures way of stopping incest?

I think it's just another way for women to discriminate and be choosy. I know that in my case, I love the way that women smell in general. Provided that they are clean and take care of themselves, I'm going to be attracted. Women, rather, being the choosers, I could see being particularly sensitive to smells, however. Quality of genetic material is more valuable to her. Guys will fuck anything.

Nature's way of stopping incest?Same concept but at a much higher level. We're not programmed to just avoid mating with our immediate family, we're programmed to seek out the most unrelated mate we can find. It's probably humanity's salvation. Regardless of racism, we all have an instinct to cross-breed with other populations of humans. With modern transportation and mobility, we'll all just be different shades of brown in a few more generations.

This is quite a contrast with one of our closest cousins, the gorilla. They remain in tight family units with a patriarch of the clan who breeds with all of his daughters and granddaughters. As a result gorillas are extremely inbred and have very exaggerated characteristics. Biologists say that if you'd never heard of gorillas and looked at two skulls from 500 miles apart you'd never guess they were from the same species.

Same concept but at a much higher level. We're not programmed to just avoid mating with our immediate family, we're programmed to seek out the most unrelated mate we can find. It's probably humanity's salvation. Regardless of racism, we all have an instinct to cross-breed with other populations of humans. With modern transportation and mobility, we'll all just be different shades of brown in a few more generations.

This is quite a contrast with one of our closest cousins, the gorilla. They remain in tight family units with a patriarch of the clan who breeds with all of his daughters and granddaughters. As a result gorillas are extremely inbred and have very exaggerated characteristics. Biologists say that if you'd never heard of gorillas and looked at two skulls from 500 miles apart you'd never guess they were from the same species.

I don't agree with that. Most unrelated within thier greater tribe possibly. There is usually an attraction to familiarity as well but the most fit within it. Those who value their genes less would go for those the most unrelated. Those who value their genes more will seek to continue it by seeking out the most fit closely resembling them.

one of the things i have heard is it is the genes that deal with the immune system that play a large part in this

@peta9: Although there IS pressure to preserve genes most resembling our own (the controversial "kin selection"), evolution NEEDS diversity to work properly.

This is the reason why siblings, except for identical twins, never look exactly the same even though they have the exact same parents. This is caused by the process of crossover during mitosis. Crossover is one of the most invaluable tools in mapping genomes since we can roughly determine the positions of traits on the chromosomes by conducting experiments to calculate how frequently they crossover.

Apparently, Darwin never read Mendel's work on what is today called genetics, and was justifiably concerned that, if inheritance was merely "mixing" of traits, then after enough mixing everyone will resemble everyone else and evolution would no longer function. Today, the synthesis of Darwin's and Mendel's work is called "Neo-Darwinism."

Geez, I don't know, Fraggle. The last time I tried to sniff a woman, she and some of her girlfriends at the bar beat the shit outta' me! :D

I get the feeling that, with all of the colognes and perfumes and body soaps and body oils and skin creams and .....that women don't want us to smell them.

Baron Max

If you looked like Jake Gyllenhaal im sure the women wouldnt mind you smelling them :D

Geez, I don't know, Fraggle. The last time I tried to sniff a woman, she and some of her girlfriends at the bar beat the shit outta' me! :D


Baron Max

Were you wearing your Bengay and Old Spice that night? Don't old men smell like that stuff? :D

strangely enough, i have a younger sis who asked why guys always sniff
there seems to be a sharper intake of breath at the requisite proximity
i'll go out on a limb and ascribe to a sniffing out of pheromones, y'know checking out to see if the bitch is in heat

ja
thats right girls
we guys sniff y'all like dogs

I have an ex-girlfriend who has recently become a very good friend (okay, so I should stop disrespecting the woman by calling her my "ex-girlfriend"; she's married and recently had her second child a few weeks ago!!). When we were together (in 2002) she never used perfume. The weird thing is, she had this strong musky smell which seemingly only I could sense.

It wasn't particularly bad or sweet, but I certainly had a reaction to it, especially since I was the only one who could sense it. It seemed to get stronger when she was menstruating, so I figured it wasn't related to being sexually receptive (since that would peak a week BEFORE menstruation, according to my teenage knowledge of endocrenology and sexuality). Now here's the interesting part: I found out later that I could also sense it in her sister, so I guess I was just smelling something in their genes?

Another thing I learnt from our short time together is that YOU SHOULD WAIT TILL YOU'VE LEFT SCHOOL BEFORE HAVING SEX! Follow my advice, kids -- uncle Zyxoas had to learn this the hard way...

*Gasp* so what they say in Personal Development Lessons are acutually true ?

you never know that you smell pheremones its like when you get a hunch about what someone is going to do or a feeling its your reacting to pheremones and other signals that we just automaticly interpet

That hunch is not from pheromones it's from memories of past and similar interactions with so said person or situations.

i could smell cathy from lille long after she left
perhaps over a year
it sucked
could'nt move on and get on with life and whatnot

hehe my boyfriend loves sniffing at me cause he says that I smell like weed in the morning.

-no comment-

weed or weeds?

That's not a compliment. Marijuana smells bad.

we guys sniff y'all like dogs

That's cos you are all dogs. Had to post here given my name! Lots of prefume companies are loading their scents with pheromones so....
What's wrong with a good old sniff anyway?

These cosmetic "pheromones" are a scam.

Yes but it sells the perfume which is also a scam!

Yes but it sells the perfume which is also a scam!

Lifes a scam. :p

We're not programmed to just avoid mating with our immediate family, we're programmed to seek out the most unrelated mate we can find.
i'm not programmed to do anything... i can program myself to feel what i want...

Marijuhana....
and to me it smells good. :)

It's marijuana or marihuana (or gamja or ganja or gãja or cannibus or dagga or insangu or...) and no matter how you spell it, it still smells like dried dog poo.

I have NEVER met a cannibus user with significantly above average intelligence, and this is a very important observation for me (since I'm a big fat snob, oh yes I am I am).

When I was in high school, as soon as I reached grade 10 and got rid of the subjects I didn't like (since I never did my homework and rarely studied, but I got As and Bs for the subjects I was interested in) I started being in the top 10 for my grade for each quarter, but there was this one kid who was always 1st, even before grade 10. At the beginning of grade 12 (the last grade) he started being a stoner. For the first 2 quarters he was still first, the 3rd quarter they never told us the positions (too busy dealing with the new syllabus, probably), and obviously after writing our final exams we simply left school. I find out that I had gotten the best marks in the school for the final quarter, and I became the dux scholar (my name is on a board next to the year 2003 in the school's reception area) -- all thanks to cannibus.

Has anyone else seen the Southpark episode with Towlie and Oprah's talking genitalia where they were making fun of the "Million Little Pieces" debacle? Marijuana makes you stoopid.

It's marijuana or marihuana (or gamja or ganja or gãja or cannibus or dagga or insangu or...) and no matter how you spell it, it still smells like dried dog poo.

I have NEVER met a cannibus user with significantly above average intelligence, and this is a very important observation for me (since I'm a big fat snob, oh yes I am I am).

When I was in high school, as soon as I reached grade 10 and got rid of the subjects I didn't like (since I never did my homework and rarely studied, but I got As and Bs for the subjects I was interested in) I started being in the top 10 for my grade for each quarter, but there was this one kid who was always 1st, even before grade 10. At the beginning of grade 12 (the last grade) he started being a stoner. For the first 2 quarters he was still first, the 3rd quarter they never told us the positions (too busy dealing with the new syllabus, probably), and obviously after writing our final exams we simply left school. I find out that I had gotten the best marks in the school for the final quarter, and I became the dux scholar (my name is on a board next to the year 2003 in the school's reception area) -- all thanks to cannibus.

Has anyone else seen the Southpark episode with Towlie and Oprah's talking genitalia where they were making fun of the "Million Little Pieces" debacle? Marijuana makes you stoopid.

one of the smartest persons i ever met was a stoner. it was always fun when reporters interviewed kids at my high school and they picked him

Well, one of the "smartest" people I ever met in school was also a stoner (his name was Avile, meaning "the Ancestors have heard our requests"). The two of us were almost alike. We were frequently the only ones in English class to know the definitions of words, the only ones to discuss cosmology and particle Physics, etc.

We were different in some ways, too. His native language was isiXhosa -- mine is Sesotho. He smoked marijuana -- I didn't. He wound up in jail after he and a friend of his hijacked a car, went on a joy ride, and got involved in a car chase and a high speed shoot out with cops -- and I didn't.

It's marijuana or marihuana (or gamja or ganja or gãja or cannibus or dagga or insangu or...) and no matter how you spell it, it still smells like dried dog poo.

I have NEVER met a cannibus user with significantly above average intelligence, and this is a very important observation for me (since I'm a big fat snob, oh yes I am I am).

When I was in high school, as soon as I reached grade 10 and got rid of the subjects I didn't like (since I never did my homework and rarely studied, but I got As and Bs for the subjects I was interested in) I started being in the top 10 for my grade for each quarter, but there was this one kid who was always 1st, even before grade 10. At the beginning of grade 12 (the last grade) he started being a stoner. For the first 2 quarters he was still first, the 3rd quarter they never told us the positions (too busy dealing with the new syllabus, probably), and obviously after writing our final exams we simply left school. I find out that I had gotten the best marks in the school for the final quarter, and I became the dux scholar (my name is on a board next to the year 2003 in the school's reception area) -- all thanks to cannibus.

Has anyone else seen the Southpark episode with Towlie and Oprah's talking genitalia where they were making fun of the "Million Little Pieces" debacle? Marijuana makes you stoopid.


Wooow what is al this about?

1)You met one stonie out of a billion and you took this to draw your conclusions....what did you tried to say??? A's and B's proof you are smart?
A's and B's proof you were a good student...but being a good student doesn't make you smart....as your conclusion sugests to proof.
2)do you drink alcohol?

I do not drink alcohol; the only time I'm regularly exposed to it is in my Listerine, my Axe spray-on deodorant, and foods containing vinegar.

I wasn't a "good student" (that would imply doing your homework). I simply read a lot of stuff, taught myself many things before learning them in school (I remember once trying to give my grade 6 class a linear programming lesson during English show-and-tell, eg.), and tried not to do anything retarded (like using drugs -- it's really quite easy).

As with alcohol, I simply do not see any reason to smoke marijuana. It smells bad and it makes the smoker smell terrible (well, the South African varieties at least; American TV suggests that their marijuana produces almost no smoke, for example).

well I always have been a good student, I finnished both college and university, I have a bright career at my feet, I daily read the papers and I read tons of books.
I have never been even close to violence, never stole nothing and always shared what I could. I work out frequently and hey I smoke weed, drink beer and take once or twice a year some mushrooms.
Almost all my friends have the same profile...non of them ever were involved in anything bad...
So with all do respect to your believes...somethimes it is smart not to think black&white.

Drug use simply is not compatible with me. It's a conscious decision I made, but even before I made it it's always been an implicit principle of mine.

I want to be the best that I could possibly be. When I see behaviour in people that I don't like this registers in me that I should not be like that. I have NEVER witnessed anything worthwhile coming from marijuana and alcohol. In my experiences, the two are symptomatic of the lowest members of society. Street children, street-corner loiterers, drunkards, abusive spouses, and general idiots of all types are often found gravitating to them. Whatever it is that caused them to be that way, or pushed them that further down, or was keeping them from rising, I do not want anything to do with it. These people have no "shadows" (a term from African religion and culture) which is a very sorry state, even for an areligious person like me.

Currently, I'm not as successful as I really should be. This is not a permanent state, and in the mean time I'm patiently sticking by my most basic principles so that when the time finally comes (I've dabbled in Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, Music Production, and Linguistics, although ultimately Computer Programming would make me the most money and that's the industry I'm trying to start working in) I have every possible mental tool of mine working as hard as possible, not dulled, and I'm not practising the same destructive habits as the above mentioned groups.

I'm not saying that you are stupid. It's just that personally, these substances would only be detrimental to me.

Btw, I'm not really repeatedly mentioning all my knowledge to brag or claim that you're stupid. I'm a cerebral person (not exactly a compliment) and I've worked very long and hard (though it was all enjoyable) for most of my life to be that way, and I continue to do so every day. I cannot imagine these substances having nothing but a negative effect on me. I understand that most people are not so obsessed with their minds as to develop depression if they are unable to learn something (which happened with me late last year when I tried learning number theory and Prolog, but I'm planning on trying again) so, I'm just a weird nerd! :p

Now, can we please discuss sex and smell? (I get the feeling that I might come back here in a few weeks time and cringe as I read my posts...:eek:)

Seems to have gotten a little off-topic...

I am wondering how this all applies to men and women who are either homosexual or bisexual??? I've never totally understood how it does, though I did hear of one study that examined the subconscious olfactory response in people of different sexual preferences.

What I'm really wondering about are the gray areas like with bisexuality, or those people who may have had a change of preference during their lives (I've actually heard of people changing sexual preference more than once). Does their response to scents/pheromones alternate with their preference? Do some of them respond more or less equally to both male and female scents? Does the biology dictate the response, or is it psychology, or a mixture of the two?

I ask not only because I'm basically attracted to other guys, but because I recognize that there are gray areas like I mentioned above, and most of the talk about pheromones involves only the typical male-female attractions, and most of us know that isn't always the case. That, and perhaps the "normal" heterosexual paradigm and the assumed biological cause-and-effect is taken for granted. By that I mean that most sexual behaviour in nature is between opposite genders for procreation, and it is assumed that this is mostly or entirely genetic, and that then carries over into research such as this about pheromones and scent attractions in humans, but we're dealing with the most complicated and evolved species on the planet, and that maybe things aren't so simple when you get to our level.

Just some thoughts from a different perspective.

And BTW, marijuana does smell really awesome! :o