True love may be a waft away

By Laura Wood

Dating sites aren’t the only alternative to meeting the perfect partner in person.

Sometimes they can be sniffed out too. All that’s required is a sweaty T-shirt, an open mind and a willing nose.

A relatively new sort of blind date fad helps single people pick mates based solely on the chemical triggers of sexual attraction. These natural triggers are called pheromones, and they can be found in almost every creature that mates to procreate and keep life going on this awkward planet we call home.

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It’s this science that gave 25-year-old Judith Prays the idea to host pheromone parties for singles who are ready to mingle and find the love of their life — or night. The idea is that if animals can come together and choose mates based off their natural scent, then humans shouldn’t be any different.

It seems quite odd to think that groups of people would gather just for the sake of sniffing strangers’ smelly clothes and finding “the one,” but I guess it’s also quite odd that some people would choose a mate based off how prepared he or she may be for an apocalypse.

According to the pheromone party website, planning to attend a stink party takes a few days’ worth of natural preparation. Coming in with just the shirt you’ve been wearing all day isn’t enough.

Participants are urged to really ensure that their odor is imprinted on their T-shirt by sleeping in them for three nights in a row and securing them in a zip-close bag that will in turn get labeled with a color — blue for boys and pink for girls — and number, then get placed on a table with other bags of the same origin.

Guests aren’t obligated to sniff every bag on the table, and there isn’t a special time for all the shirt-smellers to gather and make any final decisions. Even though the shirts are laying on the tables waiting to appeal to someone’s nose, guests are encouraged to mingle, enjoy refreshments and explore people’s essence at their own pace.

Once a guest has chosen which aroma appeals to them the most, they stand in front of a camera and take a picture with the winning bag and wait for its owner to mosey over to introduce his-or-herself and take things from there.

Even if the soiled shirt was simply too embarrassing to claim in public, the photographs taken at the party are all uploaded to Facebook and tagged the next day to serve as a reference of who chose what number.

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OK, maybe it’s a little less weird if party-goers aren’t walking around and getting uncomfortably close for the sake of a satisfying sniff, but it’s still hard to grasp the fact that people actually think this is an effective route in the path to a happy ending.

Since your natural scent is what drew your mate to you in the first place, what if your natural scent is the only thing that will keep you two together? What if he ends up waking up every morning to draw in a huge waft of sweaty pits before he takes his morning shower?

Or worse, what if he comes home to clean laundry after every business trip because she wears his dirty clothes to keep him close while he’s away?

If pheromones are so natural and naturally affect animals without their having to put much thought into the process, perhaps humans are wired the same way. One thing Prays might not have considered, though, is that those pheromones need not be confined to a plastic bag to make the mark they would already otherwise make.

Maybe it’s time for us to stop wearing deodorant in public for a while and see how far it gets us in our love lives. Any takers?

I didn’t think so.

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