James' World 2

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At Oktyabrskaya metro station, in Moscow, a towering bronze statue of Vladimir Lenin glares along Krymsky Val Boulevard toward Gorky Park. Below Lenin’s feet, among the proletariat entourage, a sculpted woman stands with one arm raised in triumphant solidarity, her armpit exposed and victorious. I decide that this is a good omen. I am, after all, en route to a smell-dating event, where Russians will be judging the attractiveness of my armpit aroma.

Billions of dollars are spent every year trying to avoid this exact judgment. For many people, body odor is so unappealing that they mask it with perfumes, deodorants, and antiperspirants. But what if our obsession with blocking BO is interfering with important lines of communication, those helpful messages aromas send about anxiety, illness, or even romance? When we spray or roll on a product, could we be blocking our chances of finding love, of finding the person—or perhaps people—who might desire us even more because of our scent?

In this era of swiping left and right in the search for a tryst or a soul mate, smell dating operates on a more analog premise. Instead of swiping, the strategy is wiping: namely, one’s perspiration onto a cotton pad. The premise is straightforward: smell-dating contenders work up a sweat doing high-intensity exercise, their perspiration-rich cotton pads are collected and placed in anonymous containers, and everyone lines up to sniff through the smelly samples. Participants then secretly rate their top preferences and give their picks to organizers, who reveal the matches. Like on the dating app Tinder, a match occurs only when two individuals pick each other’s pong.

The only criterion for a romantic match is scent, which is about as logical as any other dating filter. I mean, who cares if you both share a love of taxidermy, say, or the novels of Haruki Murakami? You’ll eventually smell the body odor of your lover, and it’s probably going to be a make-or-break moment. Smell dating skips to the chase (or, more accurately, it entirely skips the chase) and uses body odor as the first elimination round for mate selection—or date selection, at any rate.

There would be several afternoon and evening smell-dating rounds in the city’s most bustling green space, Gorky Park, as part of a larger science-and-technology festival that takes place over a weekend in May. Random people wandering around the park, science nerds attending the festival, and those attracted to the event after seeing it advertised in local media would all participate—or at least that’s what Olga Vlad, the event organizer, told me. This being Russia, people who match up at the smell-dating event would be given exclusive entrance bracelets to a nearby VIP lounge tent so that couples could get to know each other over free, all-you-can-drink vodka cocktails.

A tall German woman with impossibly straight hair and a friendly smile adds my name to the list, hands me some wet wipes, and instructs me to remove the deodorant in my armpits and any other perfumed products I might have put on today.

About forty people are milling around. A twenty-seven-year-old woman named Sofya, wearing a blue bomber jacket and a headband composed of tiny red rosebuds, is surveying the crowd. I ask whether she has ever been attracted to someone on the basis of body odor. “Yes, that’s the only way I choose a partner. I prefer that, when my partner wears no deodorant, that he smells okay. I have been repelled by a man’s body odor.” Sofya gives me a significant look that I don’t know how to interpret.

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