Love is the pits

They are invisible and occasionally irresistible.

Pheromones are the chemical triggers of sexual attraction in mammals, and for one Atlanta-based artist, they are the key to perfect blind dates.

“The first time I dated someone for purely physical reasons, it was amazing how well it went,” said Judith Prays, 25, the inventor of the Pheromone Party. “I was so into his smell even when it was objectively nasty. So then I just thought, what if I could choose people by smell?”

Her first Pheromone Party was held in New York City in late 2010, an experiment in applied sexual chemistry. Forty people were invited. (To get an invitation, guests had to send in a photo of their armpit.) Each guest was told to wear the same shirt to bed for three nights, without any perfume or deodorant.

Everyone then brought the sleep shirts with them to the party, stuffed into individually numbered bags. The bags were piled onto a table and color coded, blue for guys and pink for girls, to avoid any unpleasant surprises.

For the next few hours, as guests mixed and mingled, they occasionally stopped off for a few whiffs of a total stranger’s shirt in a bag. When someone was particularly drawn to a shirt, a photographer would take a picture of that person and the shirt of choice.

The resulting photos were then projected onto a wall. When guests saw someone holding their shirt before the camera, it was a green light to go introduce oneself.

The results, by the standards of many singles parties, were a smashing success. According to Prays’ post-party analysis, out of 40 guests in attendance, 12 of them “hooked up,” and half of those began longstanding romances.

Among those who found love was Scott Thrift, a 32-year-old founder of the creative services company m ss ng p eces.

“You enjoy the shirts that smell good and were confused by the ones that didn’t,” he said of the experience. “The first two I huffed were knockouts in a good way. I expected them all to be similar, but every shirt after the first two ranged from the unpleasant hint of onion to the downright strange scent of play-dough.”

One young woman liked Thrift’s shirt so much that the two ended up dating for six months.

“I thought it was a wonderful way to meet people,” he said. “It cuts through all of the fluff and gets straight to the point.”

Although essentially an art project, the methods Prays used for her Pheromone Party are remarkably similar to those used in chemical senses laboratory testing.

The main difference, explains Charles J. Wysocki, a behavioral neuroscientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, is that participants in his lab would have gone through a 10-day “wash out period” before the party, in which they would have used no deodorants and even avoided spicy food that could change their chemical scent. Wysocki would also have collected a blood sample from each participant to map their genome in relation to their pheromone signature.

“Attraction to pheromones seems to be how many animals do it,” Wysocki said. “Either way, it’s a good indication that you’re off to a good start.”

For Prays, who is planning another dating event for later this year, the success of her party showed how much traditional mechanisms for setting up singles are lacking.

“Written profiles are misleading,” she said. “It really only determines how good you are at writing profiles.”

Justin.Silverman@thedaily.com