Scent and Sensibility: Can You Really Smell Your Way to Your Soul Mate?

In her piece, published by RIA Novosti, Pichugina recalled the story of medieval perfumer Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the lead character in the cult hit novel by Patrick Suskind, who created potions which made people fall hopelessly in love with him. Grenouille's potion included the preserved scents of beautiful young women, whom he killed in his lust for the power of attraction.

"But is there really a scent of absolute love?" the journalist asked, turning to Russian chemists and biologists for answers.

Arkady Kuramshin, an associate professor at the Butlerov Institute of Chemistry at Kazan Federal University, says that the enchanting perfume imagined in Zuskind's novel doesn't exist. "Human beings are too much of a social animal for it to be possible to regulate affection and love only through chemistry."

Nevertheless, Pichugina noted, a popular conception in society has emerged about how the perfect scent of a woman or the musk of a real macho man can influence people's choice of partner. Scientists too have long sought to discover which pheromones might play the strongest role in a person's sexual behavior and preferences.

Pheromones were first discovered in insects. It's this chemical factor that draws the male silkworm moth to the female. But when it comes to human beings, things get a bit more complicated, according to Dr. Stanislav Kolesnikov, director of the Laboratory of Molecular Cell Physiology at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Pushino Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Biophysics.

"There is little doubt that human beings exchange chemical signals. This is evidenced by day-to-day practice and the extensive market of perfume products. Nevertheless, the existence of specialized 'human pheromones' is an issue that remains debatable," Dr. Kolesnikov explained.

Presently two of the most probable candidates for human pheromones are the male hormones androstenol and androstenone, both of which are secreted in armpit sweat. Research on the subject features a wide variety of experiments involving clothing laden with male sweat, including by American researcher Dr. Richard Doty in his book 'The Great Pheromone Myth'.

Doty and his team sought to find out whether individuals could accurately determine a person's sex based exclusively on the smell of their sweat. Most study participants did so correctly, leading researchers to conclude that at least at a basic level, sweat can help recognize sex or even a specific individual.

Similar conclusions were recently reached by researchers at the Moscow-based Miklukho-Maklai Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology. 

"Within the framework of our experiment, we tested the hypothesis that women are able to differentiate men by smell based on a set of morphological, physiological and psychological parameters marking the roles of 'macho' or 'good father', 'leader' or 'subordinate',  'risk taker' or 'risk-averse'," the study authors explained.

The Russian researchers' study asked a test group of women in different phases of their menstrual cycle to smell underarm pads which had been worn by young men and to describe the character of their owners. Most women gave rather precise descriptions. On this basis, the researchers concluded that there was some correlation between olfactory markers and male attractiveness.

Critics of this sort of experimentation question the accuracy of its conclusions, stressing that human beings are complicated creatures who cannot be manipulated by any single factor, including smell.

In any case, Dr. Kolesnikov noted that mammalian pheromone-like signals are a great deal more complex than the pheromones of insects. "An animal never produces any one smell; it simultaneously produces a bouquet. The more complex behavior becomes, the more difficult it is to single out one particular substance that drives it. Decisions taken by the animal brain are based on data coming from various channels of information, including olfactory ones."

The same is true even in the non-human animal world. For example, while dogs and cats urinate or rub themselves up against objects to mark their territory and send information to possible mates nearby, birds, who generally have a poor sense of smell, derive their mating behavior from song and mating displays.

As for human beings, there's only so much that scent in itself can do, Kolesnikov said. "There is no doubt that we too are subject to chemical communications [via smell]; we inherited this from our ancestors, and in one form or another, we too have the molecular-cellular mechanisms that provide for chemical communications in animals. [However,] the chemical communications system of humans is reduced in many ways, since we have only half as many genes with the specialized molecular receptors involved in the recognition of scent."

Accordingly, the scientist noted, when it comes to smell, "even though we differ little from animals from the physiological perspective, our feelings are mostly hedonistic. For a long time now, human beings have used the sensory systems of taste and smell mainly for pleasure. It's for this reason that we invented perfumes, food additives, various sauces, etc., and developed eating rituals. In this respect, we have come to differ quite significantly from the animal world, and very likely in the sexual sense as well. We greatly appreciate other things – conversation, the atmosphere, environment, clothing…and are less dependent on natural chemistry. Scent can start to dominate only in direct contact, the same as with animals. For instance, smelling one's partner offers the final piece of information which can support readiness for sexual contact."

Finally, Pichugina noted, because human beings are not endowed with any unconditional reflexes which guide our behavior, we act on the basis of a complex mix of other factors, including mimicry of our peers. American psychologist Harry Harlow's groundbreaking work on macaque monkeys in the mid-20th century concluded that primates' mating behavior can be stunted in the absence of older peers to show younger monkeys the ropes.