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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

People are underestimating the importance of smell in the equation.

I want a smell-based Tinder. Seriously, most of the girls I met online seemed to have incompatible pheromones.

Unfortunately, specifying smell is not possible, I suppose because of the huge gap in science w.r.t. the olfactory system. This is curious because from an evolutionary perspective smell is the sense that developed before the other senses.

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Check this out https://smell.dating. Posted recently on HN as well.

That sounds pretty creepy but I can understand how big of a factor smell is in regards to dating.

> Seriously, most of the girls I met online seemed to have incompatible pheromones.

I would legitimately be interested in hearing more about this. It's not something I've consciously experienced. How does this incompatibility manifest?

Some guys I've met in person through friends or on my own had really impressive resumes. But to my nose they smelled really bad. I don't think it was that they needed to shower more. They just naturally smelled bad all the time at least to me, so we weren't compatible.

Perhaps I am overly sensitive to smell, but it happens to me all the time, also in real life: women who are otherwise extremely attractive become repellingly unattractive just based on smell, where the smell is picked up at conversation range.

I personally thought I had a bad sense of smell but some guys have smelled really bad to me at conversation range, so I do have some sense of smell. Some women as well use too many chemicals such as hairspray, etc and smell extremely bad. I don't think they know how badly they smell or maybe they smell ok to many people. Once a woman like that sat next to me while I was eating and it really ruined my appetite. I'm not attracted to women but perhaps with women what you're smelling is the chemicals they use.

From my experiences, I can distinguish pheromones (or their absence) and any artificial add-ons (like perfume). For example, in my personal preferences' beauty scale, all asian girls are capped to 5/10, no matter how beautiful they are. I studied with many of them and was friends with few and smell-wise, all were incompatible. There is no "negative" body smell, it is just very subtle; weak and strange. Like, imagine vegetables you never ate but they smell strange so you don't want to try them. From other side of spectrum, in my preference scale, black girls, specifically from Caribbean area (Cuba, Brasil, not Africa) are also capped, to 5-6/10. However, all "specimens" I encountered have strange "pull" in the smell and it makes me forget about the cap and flirt and hang with them. I once nearly fell in love with a girl from Brasil who was 6-ish but radiated pheromones like geyser. Smell-wise it was probably a mix of body oil, perspiration and pheromones. Practically, for me, enticing pheromones are as strong as perfumes, but by magnitude more richer. "Negative" body smell/pheromones is weak, strange, yet not off-putting, just strange. That's how smell (in)compatibility manifests to me.

So she shot pheromones out of her in condensed, highly pressured streams?

Yes and anything else that influences hormones (birth control). Don't marry a woman if she's never been around you off of the pill.

Good point. By the way, I've heard that the sense of smell of a woman changes during pregnancy. A friend told me that she didn't like the smell of her husband while she was pregnant. Not that it matters much in this case :) but interesting anyway.

>Don't marry a woman if she's never been around you off of the pill.

This is an extraordinary statement that requires extraordinary evidence.

1) http://time.com/3596014/attraction-sex-birth-control/

2) http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/birth-control-pill...

3) http://www.livescience.com/48781-women-pill-men-attraction-s...

These refer to two studies, with a total of about 250 women between them. This does not qualify as "extraordinary evidence".

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