Synthetic Pheromones: Are They Really Everything They're Cracked Up to Be?

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While these claims may sound like catchphrases from the subject lines of the spam e-mails we find in our inboxes each day, they're actually advertisements from the homepages of countless Web-based perfume and cologne manufacturers.

Claims that I, too, would normally dismiss as easily as any other that seem just "too good to be true." But according to Psychology Professor Norma McCoy of San Francisco State University, she's done the scientific research to back them up.

Professor McCoy, who has spent the past several decades studying sexuality, was the first researcher to publish a study that independently tested a sex attractant pheromone for women.

Perfume and cologne products laced with "secret seducers," chemically produced substances designed to mimic our natural patterns of sexual attraction, began to hit the market as early as 1996.

But what are these companies lacing our colognes and perfumes with, you ask? Synthetic pheromones, chemical substances produced naturally by the human body in order to control urges like hunger, thirst, and yes, even sexual arousal.

"Pheromones are secreted externally," said Professor McCoy. "In the simplest terms, they work by causing a change in the reproductive behavior of another person-if you put on synthetic pheromones, for example," she said, referring directly to me, "they would stimulate the sexual behavior of the men on your campus through their olfactory sensors, causing them to be more sexually attracted to you."

McCoy and a graduate student from the SFSU Psychology department, Lisa Pitino, spent 14 weeks in 2002 testing 36 women recruited from the university, giving one portion a perfume enhanced with the sex attractant pheromone to wear and the rest of the participants one enhanced only with a harmless sugar solution known as a placebo.