Pheromone & Social Influence Research Forum

In 2008, I was working toward my doctorate in clinical psychology and having a terrible time with one particular practicum supervisor. I was desperate to improve the situation, so when I came across a scientific article about pheromones, I started wondering if they could be helpful (and if I could even get my hands on some.) It didn't take too much time for me to find a sales page for A314, from Androtics Direct.

The ad copy promised to immediately elevate my social status, causing women to want me and men to want to be me. At that time it was being sold on Love-Scent.com in a 15mL bottle of thick, herbacious oil. I was gullible enough to take the bait... and I'll be damned if the stuff didn't work. It didn't solve all my problems -- and, in retrospect even created some new problems. I didn't read any forums or think too much about what I was doing, I just knew that when I spread a couple drops of this stuff behind my ears, my asshole supervisor wasn't quite as critical.

A314 helped me get through that difficult year, and then it drifted to the back of my cabinet where I forgot about it.

The next time I came across it, I decided to do some more digging -- what'd this stuff really do? And what other possibilities were there?

I ended up registering for the Androtics PheroTalk forum, starting a journal, and being utterly captivated by the wide array of molecules, insights, potentialities, and experiences. More than anything, it was the scientific approach to pheromone testing that they advocated that really got me going. They were the first ones that really seemed to recognize that each molecule did something totally different. It wasn't just about sexual attraction -- it was about shaping social reality. Testing each molecule and combination of molecules without expectations to see what, if any, social effects it might have.

I really think Androtics deserves a lot of credit for developing this type of research as a consumer enterprise. However, in time I became dissatisfied with their level of secrecy. No matter how well you come to understand one of their putative pheromones, you never know what it is. And so, when they stop selling it, your efforts are wasted. I also kept wanting to design real experiments to determine the objective psychological effects of various molecules -- but you really can't do that kind of research when you don't know what chemicals you're using.

I also found that the readymade "consumer" products Androtics sold were very inconsistent. Sometimes you'd get a bottle that worked great, other times you'd get a bottle that did nothing.

Toward the end of my time on PheroTalk, I literally read their forum from the beginning, in chronological order. You can learn a lot doing that. But some of the things I found were not entirely agreeable to me. There had been concerted efforts to suppress and obfuscate knowledge, broken promises and intentional misleads covered over in NLP marketing malarkey. I didn't like the taste of it and wanted something without all the profit-motivated deception and general hogwash.

And I discovered that a lot of the other PheroTalk veterans who felt this way had landed at Mark-in-Dallas' new forum, PheroTruth. I found Mark to be very welcoming when I arrived there, and he helped to fill me in on some of the dramatic history that had led to an exodus of PheroTalk's most insightful contributors.

PheroTruth was a sleepy community at that time. There weren't many active members. The main thrust of the forum's attraction was that it was an open alternative to PheroTalk. You could talk about products from other companies. You could talk about molecules by their actual chemical names.., nobody was doing that, at the time, but you could.

So, I started talking about molecules. Around that time, some of us convinced Chris from Alpha Dream to start selling single molecules. Soon True Pheromones started doing the same, and I discovered that some potential pheromones could be extracted from dietary supplements at home (like pregnenolone, which turned out to be an incredibly useful molecule.)

As this surge of action brought new members to PheroTruth, I and one other member (Beccah) were named as admins. I was honored, and had a great time at it... for a while. But I became disappointed that a lot of the same drama and deception that I left PheroTalk to get away from had followed me to PheroTruth. I learned that two previous admins had left in a huff, for good reasons. Mark is a guy who is just too invested in his own ego to be able to deal with the dynamics of an Internet community.

Soon he was pretending to take hiatuses, exhorting us admins to feign impartiality and withhold our personal opinions, asking us to deceive the membership about how much control we actually had. Mark wanted to wheel & deal with vendors for forum sponsorship while playing at having entirely pure motives and taking a loss on running his forum.

I stepped down as admin when he & the other admin started censoring discussions on "the ONLY uncensored pheromone forum." Soon after, Mark had a blowout with the other admin too, and she stepped down. Later, Mark named two other longtime forum members (Terry & Pago) as admins, and again it lasted some months until they had a blowout with him and were removed.

I decided to start a new site, without all this drama that has plagued the pheromone world. Because I don't care about that stuff -- this is a hobby for me, I just want to enjoy it, learn about our world, and make some friends. So I put up HackingTheHive.com. But, the site's mission was too diffuse, the software was too complicated, and (most importantly) I just didn't have the time to put into it at that time. I set up the best single pheromone knowledge base in existence today, but I was in the middle of some major life changes and didn't have it in me to contribute on a daily basis.

In fact, for the past year I have hardly used any pheromones at all -- the occasional squirt of Glace or smear of True Alpha, but no testing or experimentation. Because my life got turned upside down... I found myself in an unfamiliar place, with unfamiliar people and social expectations, and I needed to find my baseline all over again.

Now, I've got my wits back about me and decided to start fresh with this hobby. So I registered pheros.net and set up this forum. I don't know what this community will evolve into -- at a certain point I may try to set up some organized group experiments, I may even try to set up an infrastructure to make it easier for people to get high quality concentrates or mixes. But this isn't my job -- in real life I'm a psychologist.

My central mission in starting this site is to create a fun, scientific, and reasonably drama-free place for pheromone enthusiasts to encourage one another, learn, and share experiences.

Thanks for reading all this! I'm really looking forward to getting to know you.