For every person who has ever routinely experienced addiction to the smell of their significant other's hoodie, Smell Dating is a new scent-based dating service. Although human pheromones are somewhat scientifically mysterious, common sense tells us that a partner's unique smell is super important to long-term compatibility. After the novelty of new, super hot sex wears off, once your partner's behavior begins to occasionally disgust you, and as you grow closer and closer to cohabitating, it's important that we continue to be drawn to that musky, slept-in t-shirt scent of theirs to keep us returning back to them.
Smell Dating wants to start us off on the right foot, offering only a person's smell by which to discern a potential dating match. Basically, for $25 (and if you live in New York), Smell Dating will mail you a t-shirt, which you are instructed to wear for three days and nights without using perfume or deodorant. After you've imbued it in your natural musk, you mail it back, and they send you a set of ten t-shirt swatches from 10 different potential matches. You report back to them with which t-shirt smells you find pleasant, and, if the owners of that t-shirt also report your sample tee as a pleasant smell, then you both receive each other's phone numbers from the dating service.
According to Smell Dating's FAQs, they're aiming to inject some evolutionary science back into the tech-dominated dating field:
"Unlike sight and sound, smell is interpreted first in terms of memory and emotion before being mapped to language. Although much remains unknown about smell perception, this cognitive process may be the reason that smell is so hard to describe in words, and often thought to be subjective...Smell Dating closes digital distance by restoring your molecular intuition. Our members make connections via deeply intuitive cues, perfected in the ancient laboratory of human evolution. Surrender yourself to a poignant experience of body odor."
They even cite research that suggests current high divorce rates are a side effect of "the overuse of deodorants and the underuse of our natural olfactory intelligence."
And if you're wondering whether you can request to customize your match samples by gender presentation or sexual orientation, you can't, and for good reason. Smell Dating gives everyone a randomized batch of samples, regardless of their gender identity or sexual orientation, because research shows that people broadly sniff out their own type, even in blind smell tests. For example, gay men are usually more drawn to the scents of other gay men, over straight men or women. Your nose just knows.
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