Aroma and Arousal

You come home after a long day of work to find dinner prepared and your partner sitting at the table with a sly grin. The meal is like none you’ve ever had.

First course: cheese pizza, warm and gooey but kinda bland. That’s followed by a bowl of buttered microwave popcorn. Revenge for something you said? Then, a weird dessert: pumpkin pie smothered with lavender ice cream.

“Honey,” you finally ask, “is everything okay?”

Odd Food Smells and Libido

Pumpkin pie and lavender, and other food smells like doughnuts and licorice, don’t seem like the kinds of odors men would find sexually stimulating. Yet for several years, these allegedly potent odors have appeared in media stories about male aphrodisiacs, garnering wide-eyed looks and more than a few guffaws.

The odors from the above-mentioned foods were the most sexually tantalizing of those tested in a study carried out in the late 1990s by Dr. Alan R. Hirsch, who directs the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago.

Among all the odors tested, the combination of pumpkin pie and lavender produced the greatest increase in arousal (a 40 percent increase in penile blood flow).

The next most arousing odors were a mix of cinnamon buns, doughnuts and licorice; pumpkin pie and doughnuts; orange; and lavender and doughnuts. Other stimulating aromas were buttered popcorn and cheese pizza. About what you’d expect to smell in a frat house rec room the morning after a big party.    

Sexual Scents: Fantasy?

Brown University psychologist Rachel Herz, who has made a career investigating the science of scent, laughs a little derisively when asked about the Hirsch study.

“There’s nothing inherent about the scent of any particular food that makes it sexual or arousing,” says Herz, author of the upcoming book The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell (Harper Collins, October 2007). “There’s nothing inherent about any odor to make you do anything. It’s all a function of how you’ve acquired the meaning of that smell.”

And the meaning of pumpkin pie’s odor to these 30 men?

“How odor comes to have meaning to the person is through their past experiences with it,” she says. “So without ever having smelled pumpkin pie before, it’s not going to do anything for you. But if your first sexual experience was at Thanksgiving under the dessert table, then that scent may become associated with it. In the future, when you smell pumpkin pie, you are brought back to that time and place in a very instant and visceral way, and may experience sexual arousal.”

A study Herz directed at Brown, published in the International Journal of Comparative Psychology, proved the validity of this idea with several experiments. One involved 30 women playing a computer game. Permeating the air was a novel odor concocted from buttered popcorn, dirt, and rain. The more satisfying it was for a woman to play the game, the more likely it was for her to rate the odor as pleasant. Other experiments showed a similar trend.