Pheromone & Social Influence Research Forum

One of the major problems with pheromone mixes is that some molecules dissipate at a much faster rate than others. That usually means that your light, sexy party mix turns into an overbearing androstenone bomb within 4 hours or so. Also, certain molecules just don't have the staying power that you'd like them to have. You want to experience the excellent fun-loving pro-social effects of androstenol, for example, for much longer than the 3-4 hours it often lasts. Getting the androstenol in DPG helps quite a bit with the longevity problem, but then you have to smear big gobs of oil on yourself that never seem to dry up all the way, and dosing it in relation to your other mones becomes tricky. So the ideal solution is to fix (time extend) your pheromone solutions so that everything will last longer, and the overall diffusion arc for each molecule will be closer. The traditional solution for this has been to add 10% DPG, which does an okay job. That's what gets you those 3-4 hours out of the androstenol versus the half hour or so it might last if you had it in pure alcohol.

Tonight I wanted to figure out once and for all what is the best method to fix a custom pheromone spray. The difficulty with finding the answer is that most pheromones have little or no odor by themselves, and so up until now my testing of different fixatives has consisted of trying to notice how long the effects of the pheromones are lasting on myself and those around me. This is a very imprecise method, so I decided instead to use fragrance as an analog, since pheromones are in essence a type of fragrance molecule.

For my test fragrance, I used pure bitter orange essential oil, which is a resoundingly fleeting fragrance. For each test, I used 6% essential oil and 95% ethanol.

When mixed with pure ethanol, the bitter orange scent scarcely lasted beyond the initial evaporation of the alcohol. I could smell it on my skin for maybe 15 seconds total. Very poor longevity!

Glucam P-20

Next I tried some Glucam P-20 from Perfumer's Apprentice. I tested the glucam at concentrations ranging from 2.5% to 15%. At 5%, there was some noticeable improvement in the scent's longevity. It lasted about 10-15 minutes at a good strength, and then much weaker for another 5 or 10 minutes. I found that the sweet spot for glucam was about 8-10%, at which the fragrance held on for a good half hour. At higher concentrations, the fragrance was too bound up in the fixative and had very poor dispersion. It lasted longer, but I could only smell it very faintly and had to get my nose right up into it for even that much.

To the ethanol/glucam solution, I next added a couple of drops (2.5%) of fractionated coconut oil (FCO) to see how that would affect the fragrance. It did not provide any improvement that I was able to detect, and actually seemed to further limit dispersion.

Monolaurin

Lastly, I tried Lauricidin monolaurin. It comes in little waxy white pearls that are mostly about the same size, so I measured the amount of monolaurin I was using in number of pearls rather than try to estimate the volume of the pieces. Two pearls in a 5mL sprayer significantly improved the longevity of the fragrance, to 20 minutes or more! 4 pearls in 5mL gave the best result, achieving a longevity of more than 1 hour -- astounding improvement!! More than 4 pearls gave the same effect as too much glucam. The scent remained present but very faint. Again, FCO was unhelpful.

So in my opinion the best way to time-extend your pheromone mixes is to add in 4 monolaurin pearls per 5mL of solution. That's 24 pearls for 30mL, or 80 pearls for 100mL. It takes the pearls a little while to dissolve in the alcohol; shaking the bottle helps it along.

It still remains to be seen whether the fixative effects of the monolaurin at this correct concentration will help regulate the diffusion of pheromone molecules as well as it does very light essential oil fragrances, but I can't see any reason why it wouldn't. In the past I have used monolaurin at a kind of random concentration, and with some FCO mixed in based on the assumption that this would help, but now I know that this has actually probably been reducing the effectiveness of my pheromones by holding them too close to my skin where no one can smell them. I think the 4 pearls per 5mL of monolaurin represents the best compromise between longevity and projection among the fixatives that I tried.

And since I'm a dare-devil, I went ahead and dropped 20 monolaurin pellets into my 30mL bottle of True Love. This is one mix that a several people have lamented the short life of. 8 hour TL, anyone? I'm thinking SteveO's ICM 1a mix (formerly Androtics' MX301) will be an excellent candidate for this type of fixative, since the large quantity of androstenone invariably outlasts the light and playful TAC and P74.

My 5mL sprayers of the androsterone family were running lowish from testing, so I sacrificed whatever was left in them and redid them with my new, correct, fixative solution (since I made up 100mL at a time to start out with.) The rone series is fresh in my mind from all the testing I've been doing on them lately, so I should be able to see pretty quickly how much the new fixative concentration improves the pheromone effects.