Smell Dating: The first mail odor dating service | Hacker News Reader

Smell Dating: The first mail odor dating service

smell.dating

38 pointstsol21 comments

It makes a lot of scents! er, sense.

There have been quite a few studies over the years on "partner compatibility and smell." There's some bit of the genome (MHC) where "most opposite" works best for creating healthy kids, and somehow or another, women can detect this by smell. Give a group of 10 women a bunch of sweaty t-shirts, and they'll all have a different preference for which one smells best - based on that particular genetic difference from them.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/13864652_Body_Odour... and associated similar studies all find the same thing.

Of course, hormonal birth control throws this whole system for a loop. :/ Also found repeatedly in studies on the matter.

Ladies would need to drop birth control if they were going to do this effectively. Apparently birth control inhibits their ability to discern the smell of guys, and there are stories of women going off of birth control and absolutely being repulsed by the smell of the guy they have been dating. (Not that he smelled bad, but rather it wasn't the type of smell she was attracted to.)

This is a very real thing, and it works both ways. The study I linked in another comment actually calls this out in the abstract:

> Their scorings of pleasantness correlated negatively with the degree of MHC similarity between smeller and T-shirt-wearer in men and women who were not using the contraceptive pill (but not in Pill-users).

I've twice had a very solid-to-that-point relationship just... stagnate and fall apart for no apparent reason after the woman involved went on birth control. The second time, I recognized the pattern and things went back to normal after she went off it (we're now married, with two quite healthy kids).

On birth control, it seems the preference is for "similar genetic structures" in that region - which, when pregnant, makes sense. Hang out with family who will make sure you're safe. But if you meet/marry while on birth control, then go off to have kids, this stands a very real chance of causing problems. And they're deep enough that it's not something one can easily just will their way through.

Purely anecdotal, I used to be in a running club and single, the most success I had with women was when we would stop at a bar and I would randomly talk to them while sweaty.

I'm sure it was mostly my endorphins they found attractive and not my sweat, but perhaps there is something to it.

+ pheromones

Would a woman admit to others that she was a mail odor bride?

odornarily no, but sometimes it make scents

Even if this is a good idea, you’re limited to the people that are also willing to follow through with … this idea.

The online dating scene is already very one-sided in terms of user count. How does this service intend to flourish in these circumstances, especially since there’s real person-power for the trimming and sorting of shirt-pieces?

But think about this! You can have your dog decide whom you should date.

Previously on HN (including 6 years ago): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

A sweaty shirt smells entirely different (and generally better) than a rancid, post-sweaty, unwashed shirt.

This idea doesn't even pass the, ahem, smell test.

It is kind of an interesting albeit initially kind of gross to think about idea. When you _really_ think about that person you like probably has a non-perfume smell you like for some reason you can't explain.

Though, I think this would be better executed by going to a night club or something with them...the spirit is there though. Maybe it's just the act of deliberately wearing a shirt without deodorant for 3 days, and then smelling other peoples shirts, that seems repulsive to me. It's effectively the same thing as having a sweaty person pushed up against you at a night club but because this is so deliberate it seems off-putting.

Belle Delphine truly pioneered this market with her innovative bath tub water sales

This is brilliant.

But ridiculous. Abandon the dumb apps and sites, and get out there. Get involved in stuff, activities, events, clubs, games, whatever. It's not rocket science, we've just become dumb staring at screens.

This is disgusting.

Also how does this even scale? For any dating site, someone is scrolling through hundreds of potential candidates on any given day. How small can they cut the t-shirt?

Not to mention a stale shirt is going to smell completely different after a certain amount of time particularly if it's been stored poorly.

how can you have a matchmaking marketplace with one side sending 1 and the other N? This is surely hacked in some way. Be transparent. Unless you think that one side (women for example) will be 1/nth of the total.

Only a truly rational enlightened gentleman could come up with this. Ewww.

These are the weird internet projects that are super interesting

> Smell Dating: The first mail odor dating service

Now they are monetising also our smell ? What's next ? Feces ?

match.com is furiously drafting legal threat letters

1 t-shirt is sent in, 10 samples from other shirts are returned. What happens to the rest of each t-shirt?

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