TikTok Swears These Perfumes Will Make People Fall in Love With You

By Emily Jensen

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Perfume TikTok has gained a reputation for vaulting fragrances to viral fame — just look at Maison Francis Kurkdjian's Amyris Femme, Parfums de Marly's Delina, and, most recently, Phlur's Missing Person. Popular TikTokkers like Mikayla Nogueira and Rachel Rigler have endorsed Missing Person not for its smell, but for what the perfume feels like when you wear it: "It smells like the feeling of being in love," said Rigler, who also demonstrated its efficacy on her boyfriend.

Missing Person's virality, which has helped it sell out just as Phlur relaunched under new owner and creative director Chriselle Lim, builds off an existing interest on PerfumeTok for fragrances that promise sexual or romantic perks. Both IntiMD's Pure Instinct Crave and Heaux Cosmetics scents like Habitué Provocateur have sold out thanks to the "pheromones" — chemicals that have evolved to elicit a certain behavior within a species – reportedly included in the formula to attract a particular sex. The appeal of dabbing on some magic elixir and becoming the most bewitching person in the room makes it hard to resist these kinds of fragrances, even if some of those claims are more or less based on bunk science.

Pure Instinct Crave claims to contain "pheromones imported from Italy" while Heaux Cosmetics' Habitué Provocateur lists copulins (chemicals secreted in the vagina during menstruation) and androstenol (a neurosteroid found in the testicles) among the ingredients, but they are not the first to use the promise of pheromones to sell perfume – Erox released similarly-marketed perfumes back in the 1990s. But whatever their ingredients, no perfume can reasonably claim to contain those human pheromones guaranteed to inspire sexual attraction. Researchers have not yet definitively identified them as such, let alone confirmed the existence of human pheromones at all.

Courtesy of brand

Courtesy of brand

Courtesy of brand

"The challenge is, humans are very smelly. And research or anything to do with attraction, particularly sexual attraction, is really poor," says Dr. Tristam Wyatt, senior researcher at Oxford University's Department of Zoology and author of Pheromones and Animal Behavior. "Apart from the ethics committees, humans are difficult animals to work with. We think too much, we learn too quickly," Wyatt continues. "Because we're mammals, we might well have pheromones, but none have been found yet."

Pheromones were first identified in 1959 as chemicals that induce certain behavior in members of the same species, including, but not limited to, sexual behavior. Copulins and androstenol might be human pheromones, but the research is not definitive, Dr. Wyatt says. "It's actually a problem of publication bias. People only publish when they find something positive," he explains. "It fits into the wider story of the whole problem of psychology: Things that are really nice ideas may, in small experiments, show an effect. But when you try to repeat it, you find there actually wasn't anything there." But such studies, including one funded by Erox in the early '90s, have nonetheless helped propel the myth of "pheromone"-laced products to induce sexual attraction for decades.

TikTok is merely a new platform on which to sell these products. "It's simply new audiences being found, and the marketing keeping up with the times," says Wyatt. And TikTok is particularly adept at marketing an ephemeral product like perfume. The category has a foothold on social media as a whole, but unlike Instagram or YouTube, TikTok's algorithm is able to bring in audiences who weren't previously immersed in the fragrance world, says Eden Campbell, strategy manager at creative agency Movers+Shakers in New York City. "The difference with TikTok is that the 'For You' page starts serving things up that you never thought you would be interested in."

Describing a feeling or emotion can be far more relatable than listing notes viewers might not have any frame of reference for. "At the end of the day, especially if you're not in the perfume space, you don't really care about the high note, the middle note, the low note, 'smells like this thing you've never heard of.' It's about the results that you're getting," Campbell says. "Gen Z is the first generation whose physical and digital lives are intertwined. And what we've seen is so many of these viral TikTok products are rooted in experiences that are very sensory-focused."

That TikTokkers don't often thoroughly describe the notes in those perfumes is not a bug, but rather precisely what helps these products go viral. "TikTok is really becoming this evolution in a much larger way. And so much of [what sells] beauty products is people speaking to the FOMO effect," she adds. "Perfume is invisible. Creating this hype, the sort of thing that you can't explain unless you have it, I think is a big aspect of why the perfumes have gone viral."

Courtesy of brand

Being universally appealing when it comes to sexual attraction is a nice thought, but for many of us, our ideas of romance favor the concept of one true love. Scientists have also attempted to ascertain if our noses can detect such compatibility – genetic compatibility, anyway. Dr. Wyatt points to a study from the '90s that found when women were given sweaty T-shirts worn by different men, they were drawn to the scents of guys who were most genetically different from them, but researchers are still skeptical. "It's a story that often comes up around Valentine's Day. And there are a couple of startup companies who will analyze your T-shirt or do all sorts of things, but there's no strong science behind it, sadly," Dr. Wyatt says.

The storytelling around Phlur's Missing Person attempts to capture that same magic, as the brand sent white T-shirts along with the perfume to influencers like Rigler. Of course, every customer is receiving the same bottle of perfume, not a formula that has been customized to match their lover's skin. But Missing Person has a certain mutability by positioning itself as a "skin scent," a category of fragances that allow our own aroma to come through. Pure Instinct Crave similarly promotes its ability to "blend with your skin pH," promising a scent that is both universal and one-of-a-kind to each wearer.

Your scent, but better.

"It is clean and dirty at the same time. It is sexy and transparent at the same time. So in fact, it's a matter of contradiction when you create a skin scent. And that's the beauty of it," says Firmenich senior perfumer Dora Baghriche, who has worked on perfumes like the blockbuster Glossier You. Skin scents often rely on musk, a perfume ingredient originally obtained from the glands of deer but nowadays is derived from synthetic sources for ethical reasons, to create an aroma that is both squeaky clean and animalic.

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And that's part of the appeal: it's your scent but better. "[Our pHs] are not neutral. Even if we don't wear clothes, there's the pH of our skin. Our culture, environment, what we eat, where we live — all this influences the formula of our skin, the base, and the smell of our skin. A fragrance will react with that," Baghriche says. And it's not just chemical differences, she notes, in how we smell perfumes on ourselves and others, but also a social and psychological perception. "It's how you wear it. It's like an outfit," she adds. "The shape of a person, the behavior, influences everything."

Unsurprisingly, there are those TikTok users who have shared their disappointment with the effects, or lack thereof, they experienced with these pheromone fragrances. As universal as a perfume might aim to be, smells are still largely subjective depending on our personal taste and cultural upbringing, Baghriche notes. But that hasn't curbed their popularity, as the feeling of desire is perhaps more universal than any smell could ever be. "The idea of another person's scent is very intimate and understandable. I think collectively, we are all in a place where we desire security, comfort, and the warmth of someone we love," Chriselle Lim says regarding Missing Person's popularity.

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Anyone with a TikTok account could also do a quick Google search and find that the existence of human pheromones is still up for debate and thus the promises these perfumes make are likely an exaggeration. But most people don't, Dr. Wyatt says, because the fantasy of guaranteed love or sex is too attractive to pass up. "It goes back to the hope. We're looking for somebody. And if this is going to increase the chance of finding somebody, then that's a very attractive proposition."

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