The Pheromone Party, Love Connections Made by Huffing Smelly T-Shirts

Pheromone Party 2010

Pheromone Party 2010

The Pheromone Party attendees swap bags of smelly t-shirts in order to potentially make a love connection based on the chemical attraction of other attendee’s pheromones. Every attendee was asked “to wear the same shirt to bed for three nights, without any perfume or deodorant.” Part art experiment and part dating event, the first party happened in Brooklyn in 2010 with some pretty decent results (“out of 40 guests in attendance, 12 of them “hooked up,” and half of those began longstanding romances”). The Pheromone Party is the brainchild of Georgia-based artist Judith Prays, who told Justin “Rocket” Silverman of The Daily, “The first time I dated someone for purely physical reasons, it was amazing how well it went…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?”

Screenshot from the 2010 website of The Pheromone Party:

Pheromone Party 2010

Rusty Blazenhoff
Rusty Blazenhoff