For those of us who struggle finding love, there is an interesting new alternative. Online dating has reached a new level: smell dating. Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne from Useless Press started the dating site Smell Dating and now have a client base of 35 individuals in the NYC area. Here’s how it all works. Clients pay $25 and are mailed a fresh and clean t-shirt. They wear it for 3 days, whilst avoiding deodorant and perfume. Lifestyle related smells such as cigarette smoke are acceptable as they give valuable information about a person. When you mail back the shirt after the 3 days, you receive the shirts of 10 other people. Smell the t-shirt and pick one that catches your eye…erm, nose. If two individuals match, Smell Dating gives you your match’s phone number.

While this sounds absolutely ridiculous, and is admittedly partially for kicks, there is actually science to back up the idea. While smells aren’t really the first thing you notice about a potential soul mate, it does seem to have a role in our mating choices. Our noses aren’t nearly as powerful as Fido’s so we have a hard time detecting human pheromones. Animals that use pheromones for communication do so with a vomeronasal organ (VNO). Long story short, in other animals this organ is responsible for getting the 411 from the urine mark of the dog down the street. VNO pick up scents secreted by the apocrine glands, which only appear after puberty. This indicates a potential mating strategy. The theory right now is that we choose our mates, in part, according to their genes. A gene class called MHC is related to the immune system. Women and men have rated the scents of members of the opposite sex more attractive when their MHC profiles were distinctly different from their own. MHC profiles that were similar to the participant were rated as less sexy and more like a big brother type smell. The idea is that this mechanism evolved as a way to keep variation in human populations. People who are related tend to have more similar MHC profiles than those who are not related. By not breeding with your family, you keep the population from suffering meltdowns due to inbreeding. Due to MHC’s strong association with the immune system, it is thought that MHC preferences are specifically oriented towards mixing of immune systems to provide offspring who can fend off more diseases and infections.

So all of us single ladies (and gentlemen and everyone in between) have a new way to separate out potential partners. Make them pass your smell tests on the first date. Don’t love the smell of his or her dirty t-shirt? Sorry, kid. Try someone else. My nose says no.