Annals of Marketing: Blood, Sex and Alibis

This concept is so irreducibly dumb it might succeed. The Alibi line of fragrances, produced by a South African lap dance club, provides olfactory camouflage and plausible deniability for guys who return home after a night of slipping tens and twenties into G-strings.

For example, My Car Broke Down is said to recreate the scent of fuel, burnt rubber, grease and steel, while I Was Working Late packs the odour of coffee, wool suits, cigarettes and ink.

Now if they could only solve the problem of the telltale glitter . . .

A while back we covered the quiet takeover of Human Pheromone Sciences by fan-forum-bundler masquerading as social-media-company CrowdGather, and how they planned an eau de Geek. Well, c’est arrivé.

Erox, [is] a unisex fragrance that CrowdGather claims is the first to contain a combination of two synthetic human pheromones, androstadienone and estratetraenol, and HPS’s patent-pending compound muiricin angluycone (ER303)

According to CEO Sanjay Sabnani, “the celebrity spokesperson for Erox will be model and reality star Adrianne Curry.” [Adrianne who? The one whose family owns the Palms in Las Vegas?—Ed.] No. [The romance writer?—Ed.] No! [Not that chick from Celebrity Paranormal Project?—Ed.] Yes, that one!

We’ve been thinking about vampires since watching The Hunger on Netflix the other night. It stars David Bowie and the ever-hot Catherine Deneuve. The latter also gets herself twisted in the sheets with Susan Sarandon who, although eight years past Rocky Horror, hadn’t yet become a full-fledged Hollywood activist-crone.

Deneuve once had her own perfume which, if memory serves, wasn’t half bad. So blood and scent were on our mind when this brand idea popped up: “A scent to suit your blood group.”

Italian niche brand Blood Concept has developed four unisex perfumes based around the four main blood types: A, B, AB and O.

These are perfumes based on ‘the actual smell of blood’, with creators describing all four as having underriding ‘vague metallic suspicions’.

Sure, why not?

According to rumor, Lady Gaga wants to spike her upcoming fragrance with a drop of her own blood. For some reason, this reminded us of an old limerick.

There was a young vampire called Mable,
Whose periods were heavy yet stable,
At every full moon,
She took out a spoon,
And drank herself under the table.

À votre santé!

Olfactory Tips from the Free Clinic

So you’ve exchanged a few text messages with that guy you met on VeganSingles.com, you’ve carefully chosen an outfit that’s alluring yet not Jersey Shore-ish, and you’re heading out the door for your first face-to-face, hoping for the best.

Remember one thing: get a good sniff of Mr. Eligible before taking things to the next level.

That’s the net-net from a new paper in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. Extending to humans a finding that has been well established in rats and mice, a team of Russian scientists has found that guys battling an infectious disease smell, uh, somewhat “putrid” in the armpits. And since the disease in question is gonorrhea, rank BO is another thing to watch for, along with whether he pays for the drinks and holds the door.

Mikhail Moshkin and colleagues from scientific institutes in chilly Siberia used the now-classic cotton-pads-pinned-into-T-shirts technique to collect axillary odor from young men. The odor donors included guys with current gonorrhea infection, guys cured of same, and guys who were never infected. A group of young women rated the BO samples for strength and pleasantness, and described them using a list of adjectives.

The results in a nutshell: infectious disease reduces a person’s odor attractiveness, and

The odor of infected persons was more often associated with a putrid smell. The odor of recovered persons was more often associated with a floral smell.

Moshkin et al. observed the usual experimental niceties: the odor donors refrained from eating spicy food for two days before the study, the odor judges did not use hormonal contraceptives, and the BO samples were stored at -20°C. The judge’s menstrual cycle phase made no difference to the outcome.

Saliva sample from the male odor donors were analyzed for testosterone, cortisol, and immunoglobulins A and G. None of these measures differed significantly among the three test groups. However,

while salivary IgA and IgG concentrations were insignificantly higher in the infected persons, they correlated negatively with pleasantness scores and positively with prevalence of putrid associations. A high level of the nonspecific salivary immunoglobulins reflects activation of the defensive mechanisms due to general antigenic pressure on the immune system. Several studies on laboratory animals demonstrate that antigen-induced immunoenhancement leads to reduction of male scent attractiveness.

Another small victory for the human sense of smell. Forget about electronic noses, trained service dogs, or hacking into private medical records. Just use your nose.

The study discussed here is “Scent recognition of infected status in humans,” by Mikhail Moshkin, Nadezhda Litvinova, Ekaterina A. Litvinova, Alena Bedareva, Andrey Lutsyuk, and Ludmilla Gerlinskaya, published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, ahead of print, on December 6, 2011.

Parlux Fragrances: Deal or No Deal?

Bloomberg reporter Tara Lachapelle reviews the state of play in the Perfumania (PERF) takeover of Parlux Fragrances (PARL). Since the announcement on December 23, 2011, Perfumania’s stock has declined by roughly 50%, while Parlux shares have risen to just under the offer price. To Lachapelle, this means investors believe Parlux may not be able to come up with the $15 million cash on hand required by the terms of the deal.

And what a remarkable deal it is:

At 42 times Parlux’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, the takeover is the most expensive for any acquisition in the cosmetics and toiletries industry greater than $100 million. The 140 percent premium is also the industry’s richest since 1999, the data show. The transaction, valued at about $131 million yesterday, is now greater than Perfumania’s own market capitalization of $92.4 million, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Parlux reports its earnings in the week ending February 10. So that’s when we’ll learn whether the company has amassed enough additional cash for the deal to go through.

A Critical Moment in Monrovia

In political news stories, “stink” is usually a metaphor for corruption. But in Liberia, the stink is literal and it’s emanating from newly renovated restrooms in the capitol building. The stench has caused heated debate among legislators:

“It is beyond my thinking for a man, who requested for this building to host presidential ball to come here at about 8:00 am to complain of bad smell. This place was used by thousands of people, and definitely you as normal human being should expect offensive smell”, he responded.

Wait a minute. Smelly visitors to the capitol? That rings a bell.

This is What Democracy Smells Like?

OWS on parade in S.F.

FirstNerve has followed the career of olfactory artist Gayil Nalls ever since I interviewed her back in 2009. This week she’s launched her latest project, “The Smell of a Critical Moment.” It seems to be a group olfactory portrait of Occupy Wall Street. The expected headline from the New York Post (‘Occupy’ art a stinker) led me to look at how Nalls herself describes the show:

This exhibition is concerned with the conjunctions where art, olfaction and politics intertwine.

Neato! That’s also one of FN’s favorite triple conjunctions.

With this work, Gayil Nalls argues that the sense of collective experience has distinct olfactory aesthetics.

OK. Every crowd has its own smell.

While predominately imperceptible, the sense of smell allows for a binding power contributing to the sensus communis, or the power of the people, demonstrating that the sociocultural Zeitgeist or mood of this movement has an olfactory truth.

Olfactory truth of the Zeitgeist? Uh . . . I guess so. In my experience, “power to the people” smells like pot, patchouli, and jug wine.

Visitors will experience chemosensory messages of Occupy Wall Street protestors from tee shirts worn by 99 participants: physical Occupiers, working group members and solidarity marchers.

“The comrades of the Park Slope Organic Arugula Collective sweat in solidarity with the oppressed brothers and sisters of the Noam Chomsky Anti-Imperialist Study Group!”

A tag hangs from each shirt revealing identification and contact information for each individual and their [sic] statement of dissent.

Hmmm . . . that could backfire.

The shirts give form to a body of messages, having been worn for the previous week, absorbing the molecular form of this enigmatic moment.

What was enigmatic about it? I went to Zucotti Park and saw a bunch of neo-hippies pissed off about their student loans, along with a lot of the usual protest fringers (LaRouchians, Krishnas, anarchists and stoners). I found it emblematic of the stale state of the “progressive” movement.

If you missed Zucotti live, you can get a nostalgic nose full of it courtesy of Gayil Nalls at Doorways, 62 Van Duzer Street, in Staten Island, NY, through February 11.