Realm, a product of Erox Corporation in Fremont, Calif., is being watched closely by the rest of the cosmetics industry. That is because the unique fragrance was recently launched in major cities east of the Rockies with sales figures that went through the ceiling.
According to Clive Jennings-White, an Erox chemist who recently visited ZCMI to promote Realm, it is selling very well. "In the next 6 months or so we will have the fragrance launched in most of the country. It's exciting, because we're the only perfumery company that can deliver on its promises. We don't rely on big name personalities to sell the product, because we have the solid background of science."Jennings-White is referring to the legendary "Sixth Sense" people have talked about for centuries. Realm, you see, is the first and only fragrance company to use human pheromones; and Erox has the U.S. patent on the use of human pheromones in fragrances.
In case you don't get out of the house often, the term pheromone was first used in the 1950s to describe the essence released into the air by female silkworm moths to entice males to mate with them. Pheromone comes from the Greek words, phero ("I carry") and hormone ("to excite"), and means literally "I carry excitement."
It is generally known that animals communicate with each other by issuing biochemical cues warning of danger, calling attention to the presence of food, marking boundaries or indicating sexual readiness. This perceptory sense complements sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch.
One whiff and the animal carries out "orders" automatically. Bees whose hive is threatened will answer the call of a pheromone that commands them to swarm and sting in concert, driving away an intruder. A few molecules of a pheromone floating past a male hamster's nose will send him on an anxious hunt for the female ready to receive his amorous advances.
Jennings-White says the most familiar one is the "ant-trail pheromone. The ant goes out from the nest foraging for food, usually in your kitchen, brings it back to the nest, and leaves a trail of a particular pheromone. Then it tells the other ants, `Hey, guys, follow this trail.' The other ants do, and each brings back a little piece of food. They're not following each other visually. If you wipe off some of the trail with a solvent, like alcohol, then the ants just wander aimlessly when they reach that part of the trail. They're clearly following this particular chemical."
When fragrance promoters today promise the use of pheromones, says Jennings-White, they mean animal pheromones, not human ones. "The most famous is musk. The pheromones from beaver and pig are used a lot. On the bottle it may say, `a pheromone-based product,' without saying which animal. Pig farmers use a fragrance with pig pheromones for pig breeding, but it will not be effective on humans. Only human pheromones are effective on humans."
Most consumers will be glad to hear that.
In the late 1950s, David Berliner, a University of Utah anatomist, started to investigate the composition of human skin. He found a convenient supply of skin cells by scraping them off casts removed from the broken legs of skiers who had had accidents on Utah mountain slopes.
As he worked with the substances he had extracted from the skin cells, Berliner noticed a curious phenomenon. Whenever he left open certain vials containing extracts, his own feelings and those of other researchers in his lab seemed to become warmer and friendlier. When he capped the flasks and put them away, people's feelings deteriorated.
Because of the press of other interests, Berliner never finished his research. Nearly 30 years later, in 1989, he returned to his experiments and established Erox Corporation. Gradually, because of Berliner's and other researchers' work, the acceptance of human pheromones has become accepted in scientific circles.
According to Jennings-White, "we realized that we have this separate organ in our nose, called the vomeronasal organ or VNO. It sits within the mucous membrane that covers the plow-shaped septum, the cartilage that divides the nostrils. It was discovered in 1703 by a Dutch surgeon named Ruysch, but nobody knew what it was doing then. Recent research has shown that this organ responds to substances that occur naturally in the human skin."
Since it was not practical to "go around skinning people," Erox chemists had to reproduce human pheromones synthetically. They recreated the exact molecules in the lab, then studied their effect. They conducted a psychological study on 14 volunteers to determine how the pheromones made them feel. Half of the subjects received a puff of pheromone pushed directly through a tube into nasal organ, and the other half received only a puff of air.
It was a "double blind experiment," meaning that neither the researchers nor the subjects knew which people were receiving the pheromones. At the end of the experiment, the subjects received a questionnaire with a list of 70 different adjectives, each relating to how they were feeling. Some of the questions asked whether respondents felt "sexy," to discern if the pheromones were aphrodisiacs.
They did not feel "sexy," but they felt better about themselves, says Jennings-White. Human pheromones do not rouse sexual desire nor heighten sexual pleasure. Instead, they help a person "feel more attractive by enhancing positive feelings such as comfort, security, well-being and confidence."
Erox researchers decided that people would like to wear a perfume that made them feel better about themselves. "The next step," says Jennings-White, "was to create a perfume that was compatible with the pheromones. Then we did another experiment in which we delivered the fragrance vapors containing the pheromones into the nasal organ. We found a dramatic electrical response."
That means all the other components of the fragrance were not diminishing the effect of the pheromones. "The fragrance works through the olfactory system, and the pheromones work through the nasal organ," said Jennings-White.
Finally, the researchers, who wanted a "rigorous scientific background" for the product, did a psychological study using 400 people who wore Realm for two weeks. (Men wore Realm for Men, and women wore Realm for Women.) Then they brought out the same psychological questionnaire and found that 85 percent of the respondents ranked in the highest categories connected to well-being, feeling at ease and self-confidence.
Jennings-White said the experiment convinced them that they had a highly functional product.
The result is Realm for Women and Realm for Men - consisting of perfumes, body lotion and shower gel for women, and cologne, shower gel and aftershave balm for men. The manufacturers say that women who wear Realm have an "enhanced sense of ease, openness to others and to their own sensuality," while men who wear it describe "enhanced feelings of ease and self-confidence."
Realm for Women begins with a top note of Sicilian mandarin, Italian cassia and Egyptian tagetes, and the romantic addition of fresh peony and water lily. Realm for Men consists of crisp, watery top notes of galbanum, berganot, lavender and California oranges and mandarin. At the core of the scent is a rich blend of juniper berry, bois de rose and litsea cubea, spiced with ginger.
The bottles are created by the world-famous bottle designer Pierre Dinand, who has created a ruby and flint glass container to dramatically express the dual nature of the Realm fragrances. The red and clear facets are intended to capture every flicker of light and shimmer like futuristic jewels.
Whatever the ultimate success of Realm fragrances, Berliner has already started another company, called Pherin, that is exploring ways to control hunger with a nasal spray that incorporates an appropriate pheromone. The possibilities are both endless and intriguing.