The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [72]
I have little doubt that Berliner and Erox were once in search of the overpowering sexual attractant we dreamed of in high school. The vast majority of perfumes for women contain real or synthetic versions of pheromonal secretions from the Himalayan musk deer and the African or Asian civet cat. But in a medical journal published in 1991, Berliner and Jennings-White point out that this is illogical: pheromones operate only among members of the same species. Human pheromones would be “more natural and more effective as true attractants.” “The human behavior expected from pheromone stimulation is an enhancement of libido.” “The effect of pheromones would be … profound and irresistible.”
But now Erox claims that ER-670 and ER-830 have only a modest sensual effect, making female subjects feel warmer and more open and male subjects feel more confident and self-assured. This is a far cry from the stiffened legs and cocked ears of the sow. Despite the 1991 article, everybody at Erox now says that the discovery of a compelling human attractant would have been a nightmare, at least for the marketing people. The only nightmare I can picture is that they could not have found enough wheelbarrows in all of Salt Lake City to carry their profits to the bank.
Thus far, Erox has no statistically persuasive evidence that its perfumes have even these mild sensual effects. Erox has not scientifically compared its fragrances with and without the pheromones or against some popular but conventional perfumes. It is almost as though Erox were wary of learning the results. Wearing its perfume might turn out to be little different from dabbing yourself with a conventional fragrance while drinking a frosty martini.
Nearly all the major perfumes sold in this country—whether by Calvin Klein, Giorgio, Estée Lauder, or others—are formulated at one of six fragrance companies (also known as essential-oil houses) in or around New York City by a tiny group of extremely talented “noses,” or perfumers, and each contains between two hundred and four hundred ingredients. Following the customary practice, Erox’s president, Pierre de Champfleury (former head of Yves Saint-Laurent fragrances and cosmetics in Paris), and consultant Ann Gottlieb (to whom many attribute the success of Calvin Klein’s Obsession, Eternity, and Escape) wrote a “brief” and submitted it to three of the six major fragrance companies. A brief explains the idea behind a prospective scent, the aura that it is supposed to create, and sometimes even its name, the appearance of the bottle and packaging, its intended position in the market, and how it will be advertised.
The three companies responded with preliminary samples of the desired scents, and Champfleury and Gottlieb chose two: the female perfume from Firmenich and the male fragrance from Givaudan-Roure. (Both companies will supply only the essential oil to Erox; the formulas remain their intellectual property.) The fine-tuning that ensued was more complicated than usual because the pheromones stayed in Salt Lake City; each scent could be tinkered with only after the people in Salt Lake had added the appropriate pheromone and shipped it back to New York. Erox’s perfumes contain no musk or civet or castoreum—Berliner’s human pheromones replace the usual animal attractants. One dose is meant to emit the same quantity of human pheromone as is given off by a completely naked body.
As we had agreed before I flew out to Salt Lake City, Jennings-White allowed me to try preliminary versions of the Erox pheromone perfumes, to be called Realm for Women and Realm for Men. I chose the back of my left hand for the male scent and the back of my right hand for the female. The male scent was woodsy and spicy though light and simple-hearted; the female scent was warm and cozy with an initial floral impression and an underlying Oriental character. Hundreds of times in the next three days I sniffed at