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 Artist Tega Brain, who teaches at New York's School for Poetic
Computation, and Sam Lavigne, an editor and researcher at New York
University, created Smell Dating, which they describe as an art
project.
Each of its first 100 clients received a T-shirt to wear for three
days straight without bathing. The clients then mailed the T-shirts
back to Brain and Lavigne's "Sweat Shop" at NYU, where they were cut
into swatches. Smell Dating then sent batches of 10 mixed swatches
back to the clients to sniff this week.
A match will be made if one client likes the scent of another and
the olfactory attraction is mutual. In other words, if "Client 55"
likes "Client 69" and vice versa, put a heart around it, Brain said.
The idea is based on the science of pheromones, the chemical signals
that creatures from gerbils to giraffes send out to entice mates.
Clients, who pay a one-time fee of $25, dive in nose-first, unaware
of a potential smell-mate's age, gender or sexual orientation.
"Most normal dating services, you rely on profile pictures,
assumptions that come from visual information," Brain said. "You
either really like the smell of someone or you don't. It's much more
innate."
On Wednesday, 25-year-old NYU graduate student Jesse Donaldson
excitedly opened the package of white swatches in individually
numbered plastic bags that had arrived at his apartment in Brooklyn.
He said he hoped Smell Dating could help where other popular
matchmaking services had failed.
"I'm like so many other people in New York City, using Tinder, using
OK Cupid," Donaldson said, "and my main issue with these things is
you feel like you're shopping for somebody as opposed to making a
genuine connection with another human being."
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Brain said she and Lavigne consulted "a lot of smell researchers"
about their art project, which explores whether a person's body odor
can trigger Cupid's arrow.
"We wanted to see if people would be interested in meeting other
people just based on this one bit of information rather than this
avalanche of information that you usually get," said Lavigne as he
watched volunteers wearing hooded white jumpsuits and blue rubber
gloves cut up the worn T-shirts at the Sweat Shop.
"Whoa! This one is ready to go!" said a worker, wincing as he
sniffed a swatch before putting it into a plastic bag marked #34.
In Brooklyn, Donaldson tore into the first plastic bag, removed the
swatch and sniffed. "Fresh-done laundry," he said.
He opened another and inhaled. "Oh. That is nutty. I'm just going to
seal that back up."
Then he brought yet another swatch to his nostrils, nodded and said,
"Oh." He savored a second whiff and added, "That's my match."
(Reporting by Barbara Goldberg and Angela Moore; Editing by Daniel
Wallis and Lisa Von Ahn)
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