Since I have a gender neutral name, my email Inbox is not only stuffed with breast enlargement ads and homeopathic menopausal treatments, but also with solicitations for penis enlargement, cheap Viagra, and marriage offers from sketchy Asian mail order brides. 99.9% of the time I roll my eyes and hit delete, until I saw this:

Remember how you felt when your dream girl shot you down? Well now you never have to feel that way again! Pheromones have been proven to work, and are guaranteed to increase your attractiveness to women of all ages. Just look at some of the testimonials we have received back from 100% satisfied repeat customers! :

“I’ve always had a problem approaching girls. They would just walk past me like I didn’t exist. I sometimes felt like they purposely would not give me any attention just because they were snobby and stuck up. Now, when I use U l t r a Allure Pheromones, it’s alot easier to approach girls because THEY are usually the ones that will smile at me first or make eye contact.”
Robert K, Boise Idaho

“I saw you guys offered a money back guarantee, so I though I would give it a go(I had nothing to lose). Well how glad am I that I did! My first night out with a little U l t r a Allure on me I had 4 different girls ask me what I was wearing and what I was doing later (I met up with the hottest of the 4 Now I don’t even leave the house without throwing on a few dabs of U l t r a Allure- its my (not so) secret weapon! I can honestly say this product truly works, women are really drawn to you once they catch a little bit of the scent.”
Brad M. Kentucky

We receive dozens of emails daily just like these ones! Don’t be left out!

Pheromones have been studied extensively and profiled on such media outlets as CNN, Oprah Winfrey show, ABC, MSNBC, FOXNEWS, and magazines such as MAXIM, FHM and PLAYBOY!

Visit our website now to check out the huge discount sale going on right now! Hurry though as discount specials will be discontinued within the next few days!

First of all they spelled ‘guaranteed’ wrong in their promotional message (I corrected it.) Secondly, I remained impressed that a scam Internet company had got on the fake pheromone bandwagon, since from what I understand, pheromones are a pretty complex, scientific concept. I ended up reading the email and actually taking a quick look at their site because pheromones have always been of special interest to me. At age ten my mother gave me a lecture that troubled for the next decade:

“So much of why you might like someone is subconscious. When you meet a person, teeny tiny pheromones are determining if that person is a good match for you.”

As a child, this concept freaked me out and made me feel frighteningly out of control of my romantic destiny. My mother cheerfully ended the speech with:

“See. We’re more like animals than you’d ever think.”

I intensely remember this afternoon mother-daughter conversation, and I’ve been pretty much fascinated and paranoid about pheromones ever since.

Technically defined, pheromones are “a chemical secreted by an animal, especially an insect, that influences the behavior or development of others of the same species, often functioning as an attractant of the opposite sex.”

Come to find out, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Internet has monopolized on this concept. You can buy different pheromone blends from over a dozen sites. As the annoying assholes who sent me the above email describe on their web page:

Imagine this scenario. You’re out clubbing with your friends. You notice a beautiful woman across the room. Under normal circumstances she wouldn’t give you the time of day, but you know one thing she doesn’t. You’re wearing Ultra Allure pheromones. You walk up to her beaming with confidence. She senses someone approaching turns around and doesn’t take her eyes off you until she leaves your place the next morning. Poor girl, she never had a chance.

Huh. My guess is the guy might have had a better chance if he was smart, charming, witty, made eye contact with me, and offered up some drinks. But hey, I guess just dosing yourself in expensive chemicals bought over the Internet is a game plan too.

Obviously, there’s no way that this stuff actually works. My limited understanding of how pheromones function is that it’s not a Love Potion #9 or sex scent like musk, but that men and women’s pheromones work to actually analyze one another’s immune systems to determine that if mating, they’d produce a healthy offspring. I think that kind of scientific compatibility is probably too complex to put in a jar. But hey – what do I know. According to this website, I’m just a “female who won’t know what hit her.”