The internet has a new dating hack, and it involves not taking a shower

Dating advice on the internet has officially run out of things to tell us. We’ve been told to master our flirting technique, optimise our dating profiles, find our “type”, romanticise the meet-cute, and apparently now, smell like we haven’t seen a shower in three business days.

We’re talking pheromone maxxing, the internet’s latest spin on the “maxxing” universe, where people are attempting to make themselves more attractive by amplifying their natural scent. The logic is that humans supposedly give off pheromones that influence attraction, so why interfere with nature by covering yourself in deodorant? Just let the musk musk.

The trend has, however, gone considerably further than skipping a spritz of deodorant. Posts and videos circulating online claim that people are deliberately avoiding showers, rewearing sweaty clothes, and trying to make their natural scent as potent as possible before dates. At this point, we’ve officially travelled from dating advice to biological fan fiction, simply because the internet is incapable of leaving a questionable wellness trend alone.

And this is where pheromone maxxing really loses the plot. The trend seems to suggest that the more concentrated your natural body odour is, the more attractive you become, which is a pretty vague interpretation of how attraction works. There is no magic sweat setting that takes you from “cute” to “irresistible”. If anything, there is a very real possibility of taking the “I want you to notice me” energy into a rather disgusting territory. Romance is many things, and an unsolicited whiff of someone’s armpit should not be one of them.

So, if pheromone maxxing has taught us anything, it is that the internet will find a way to turn absolutely anything into a competition. Looksmaxxing, sleepmaxxing, aura farming, and now apparently smelling as human as possible. Where does it end? Hopefully with a shower.

Let your natural scent be natural, keep the three-day-old t-shirt where it belongs (in the laundry!), and perhaps leave the pheromone maxxing experiment to social media. Because if your dating strategy requires someone to smell you before they see you, and if you turn up without a shower, you'll definitely leave an impression, but a bad one at that.

Lead image: IMDb

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