Scott Yacyshyn, left, talks with Tegan Artho-Bentz as she smells a shirt during a pheromone party, Friday, June 15, 2012, in Los Angeles.
Some say love is blind, but can it smell?
That’s the question put to the test at ‘pheromone parties’ — a new dating movement that, unlike personality surveys and marketplace transactions, relies on biochemical compatibility to suggest good romantic matches.
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These parties — which the Associated Press reports have appeared in several cities around the country including New York and Los Angeles — ask that singles submit a worn T-shirt, and then allow other participants to have a sniff. If the smell is intriguing, then a photographer takes a picture of them with the shirt and sends it to a projector so the chemically-appealing participant can come forward.
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The AP reports the origins of these events:
Judith Prays, a web developer, said she came up with the idea for pheromone parties after she failed to find a match online. Prays said she’d date men for a month or so before things soured until she started seeing a man who wasn’t what she was looking for and wound up in a two-year relationship.
What she remembered was his smell.
“Even when he smelled objectively bad, I thought he smelled really good,” the 25-year-old said. “And so I thought, OK, maybe I should be dating based on smell?”