Anti aging:Debating Whether Pheromones Exist for Anti-aging Beauty by Lorne Caplan
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We have looked at whether our attitudes can influence our ability to stay young and look young. Despite the usual negative pundits telling us that we’re going to age no matter what, one way to avoid the rickety old look of a weather beaten piece of wood, is to focus on keeping our intimate lives active and interesting. One way to absolutely do this for anti-aging beauty, is to keep our favorite scents (that might mean our partners scent) available and to use them to improve our attitudes and moods.
While researchers like Charles Wysocki, a behavioral neuroscientist at Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, have been nay-sayers for years and effectively continue to receive grants and funding to deny that pheromones exist. Proponents like Eros’ founder James Vaughn Kohl, are constantly educating and training the population and researchers on the reality of pheromone science, compiling research, white papers and fielding sometimes acerbic detractors. Certainly they are intelligent men and that is the shocking reality we researchers have to deal with on a daily basis. For intellect to deny that chemical messengers exist to act as precursors to intimacy is preposterous! 20 years ago, the entire anti-aging beauty field was also called into question, with grizzled old Western trained docs, dribbling their displeasure with people wanting to stay young looking and vital. The argument now goes on to say that primer pheromones are more likely than releaser pheromones. Again, a silly take on what happens to mammals including humans, when certain scents elicit a hormonal response. That is one of the keys of course. We, as humans are thinking animals, able to weigh the consequences of our actions. While lower mammals simply act on their impulses. We use sight, feel and hearing along with thought in how we mate (our success rate at procreating is excellent with more than 6 billion of us on the planet, but our emotional states, well that is another thing all together). One of the chief aspects of how we mate, calling it courtship, romance, passion, intimacy or some other form of what we humans relate to as procreation, is indeed smell. The olfactory sense has always had a bum rap in it’s inability to be processed, or read sufficiently before entering our brain, which is the true sexual organ and that is where the nay-sayers fall short. It is in fact the brain and it’s superior hormone excretion functions for oxytocin, seratonin, dopamin and testosterone (the message coming from the brain) among other hormones, that dictates how we will react from the limbic brain transmissions, to what we are smelling. We as humans will have a change in our attitude, energy level and emotions simply from the scent of either the top notes that we are taking in through our olfactory system, or from the chemical messengers known putatively as pheromones, for which there are hundreds described in white papers and literature, with new chemicals being discovered everyday. In what combination and to what extent the human animal reacts to the scent sexually, is still up for some debate because of the number and combination of chemicals, but that there is a reaction or change in mood cannot be debated. In essence, the change IS physiological because our hormone levels are changed due to our brains reaction to the inhalation of these chemicals that derive from bacterial breakdown on the skin along with the various fractured hormone molecules that are excreted through the waste organ also know as the skin. Yes, the process is indeed very complex, but complexity should not engender simply a call for more research as most scientists and physicians tend to rely on. Rather, we should accept that there is a causal relationship in how pheromones and scent combine (perhaps if we replaced the word pheromone, with physiological compounds, then the scientific community would be less likely to pooh-pooh their existence) to cause humans to feel more amorous toward one another, but not everyone that is in the vicinity just as baboons don’t jump on each member of the opposite sex. Unfortunately, as in with any research related to sexuality, there are plenty of opportunists who will make unsubstantiated claims and often not even have any pheromones in their formulation, but well know pheromones companies such as Master & Mistress and Athena Institute, whether developed by Dr. Pugliese of Dr. Cutler, do indeed have a reputation and pheromones in their products. Regardless of what product is being marketed, the dispute about whether pheromones are a releaser or not is moot. Those sex inducing chemicals known as pheromones exist. They affect our minds which in turn change the composition of our hormones which in turn cause us to feel and that is the key after all. We as humans feel and emote while most of our lower mammal cousins do not. So do experiment with certain pheromone products, enjoy the placebo or real affect and keep reading about the advances that science is making despite the negative undertones of those that fear discoveries are being made right under their noses (pun intended!)