Fragrances and Pheromones: The Cost of Smelling Good

If you’ve ever used one of those apps that check the toxicity of cosmetics, you’ve probably noticed that perfumes and products that have fragrances score high in harmful toxins. I myself was surprised to learn the extent to which these products (which are somehow still considered safe by regulators) effect our overall health — but particularly, our reproductive health. As Shanna H. Swan explains in her book Count Down, most cosmetics (hair products, creams, lotions, etc.) contain ‘a cocktail of heavy metals and endocrine-disrupting chemicals’ that contribute to the current fertility crisis. The irony is that these products are marketed to improve our attractiveness, while at the same time harming our sexual health.

Another point that I don’t see discussed as much is that as the cosmetics industry has expanded (creating, for instance, a male market where there wasn’t one), the amount of sex that we’re having has gone down. This means we spend over 100 billion dollars year on cosmetics (ostensibly to improve our attractiveness), only to end up having less sex than we’ve ever had before. Perhaps, some of these products are actually making us less attractive to each other. This would especially make sense in terms of the fragrances, which, I suspect, may interfere with our ability to sense sex-related pheromones.