At a dimly lit art gallery in Los Angeles on a recent night, partygoers huddled around several tables covered with plastic freezer bags stuffed with shirts and an index card bearing a number. Once they found one they liked, a photographer snapped a picture of them holding the bag and projected it onto a wall so the shirt’s rightful owner could step forward and meet his or her odor’s admirer.
Konstantin Bakhurin, a 25-year-old neuroscience graduate student, said he bypassed the bags that smelled like baby powder or laundry detergent or perfume in search of something more unique: the owner of a distinctive yellow-T-shirt whose fragrance he described as “spicy.’’
“I think it’s probably a bit more pseudoscience,’’ said Bakhurin, who attended with two fellow graduate students from University of California, Los Angeles. “I just kind of came here for kicks to see what would happen.’’
The parties are a marked contrast to the proliferation of online dating sites, which demand countless details from singles, and in some ways are taking romance back to its most primal beginnings.
Judith Prays, a web developer who now lives in Atlanta, said she came up with the idea for pheromone parties after she failed to find a match online. Prays said she’d date men for a month or so before things soured until she started seeing a man who wasn’t what she was looking for and wound up in a two-year relationship.
What she remembered was his smell.
“Even when he smelled objectively bad, I thought he smelled really good,’’ the 25-year-old said. “And so I thought, OK, maybe I should be dating based on smell?’’
At first, it was an experiment. Prays invited 40 friends to a party in New York and asked them to sleep in a T-shirt for three nights, put it in a plastic bag and freeze it, then bring it to the party. Bags were coded with blue cards for men and pink for women and numbered so the shirts’ owners could pinpoint their admirers.
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