Pheromone Parties: The 'Smell' of Love

Although to form our first impressions on a person we usually rely on visual observations, recently a kind of party became quite popular, where the brave ones let themselves carried by the sense of smell in discovering a compatible partner. 

This is the idea behind pheromone parties for single people. During the event, matchless men and women choose, by smell, a person of the opposite sex who they would like to know.

The idea of ​​this kind of party was born in the USA and works as follows: those present at the party sleep three nights before the event, dressed in a cotton shirt that you will put in a sealed bag to preserve smell and with which they will present at the party.

Last Tuesday was the first edition of pheromone parties in Britain, where over 100 people participated. A journalist from The Independent newspaper went and felt with 'her nose' the whole party.

Philippa, a woman aged 35, faithful to dating sites, told The Independent that the reason she chose to take part in the event is that she "likes to do things differently."

Judith Prays, founder of the pheromone parties in LA, started this business four years ago after she realized that online meetings lead, most of the times, to short relationships. Her answer, in this case, was science , based on a research by Claus Wedekind, a Swedish biological scientist, who discovered during a study in 1995 that women are attracted to the subtle smell  of man and that they want to get the attention of those males who's histocompatibility genes are different from theirs.

"Pheromone parties are not only about the smell, but there are many questions about how we find our partners rising. These meetings put the meetings in a new light and make us think of our selection criteria over anyone," said Prays.

Participants have numbered shirts strung on tables around the room. People come, smell, take a picture with the 'lucky' number and then their picture is then projected onto a wall. This is a way to break the ice: if you like the person who liked the smell, you can go on into a conversation.

"There are three kinds of shirts. Some smell like those who wore them were ashamed of their scent, so they clogged their shirts with perfume, others smell like rancid butter and others simply smell good," said a man who took part in the unusual parties.