Switch on your TV at almost any time of the day or night, and before long you will likely see an advert for aftershave, cologne or deodorant. What do these adverts nearly all have in common? A hunk of a guy wearing a fragrance attracts a beauty, simply by wearing that fragrance. Nothing to do with his good looks and muscular, half-naked body of course, it’s the perfume that did it. This is perhaps because the majority of advertising agencies, marketing professionals and fragrance manufacturers would agree that beautiful people sell products, and ugly ones do not Perfume.
An important exception to this is the recent campaign in the UK by Lynx (made by chemical giant Unilever) which shows a very ordinary series of men suddenly becoming irresistible after spraying a little deodorant on themselves. This is a clever campaign; Lynx is already the leading deodorant brand in the UK and thus has wide appeal across most income groups and social strata. To maintain and extend this position, they must appeal to everyone, and a campaign using both humour and ‘ordinary’ people is a clever move.
What this all boils down to is that it is widely held that the fragrance you wear has an effect upon your attractiveness, effectively as a potential mate. For sure, a strong smell of stale sweat, for example, is unlikely to attract all but the most unusual of partners, at least in this day and age (One cannot help but remember that in certain classes in nineteenth-century France, a pungent unwashed aroma was thought desirable. Consider Napoleon’s letter to his wife, Josephine at the end of the Austrian campaign, which contains the line “I am coming home my dear. Do not wash”).
Today, if the advertising agencies are to be believed, the fragrance you wear will have a direct effect on your ability to ‘pull’ a girl. The sense of smell is the most basic of all our senses, and has a pedigree stretching right back to very beginnings of life. It is the simple detection of chemicals in the surrounding medium, which in our case is air. Detecting these chemicals has a direct effect upon the way we interact with our environment, and often we are unaware of this as the chemicals appear odourless to us; in other words, we detect them without becoming conscious of it. For example, if you smell a food you like, you may become hungry, and certainly you will become conscious of the desirable smell. In this instance, the smell has an effect on both your conscious and subconscious levels of perception: – the smell makes you think “Mmm, that smells good!” (a conscious action) and at the same time it gets your body ready for food (you salivate, your stomach dilates and starts to produce more gastric juice etc) which happens unconsciously. In another exa
