How does a shower affect your pheros?

[druid]

Before I go out \"poon huntin\" with pheros on I take a shower. Then after I get dressed I apply the pheros on my wrist/arm or whatever. Now I have read in a few other posts that bacteria somehow work with pheros to make them work (I am not to clear on this -- someone please explain) What I want to know is can a shower destroy these bacteria, and would that negate the pheros? If so how long would it take for more bacteria to appear again?

[druid]

BUMP YOU

[**DONOTDELETE**]

never ever take a shower 12 hours before being around a chick...youre musky odor will drive them horny...showers destroy good bacteria ....wear deoderant only, no anti perspirent...if necessary, rub your apocrine glands and wipe them

[druid]

12 hours?!?! what if I just don\'t use an antibacterial soap? what are the aprocine(however it is spelled) glands?

[DrSmellThis]

I like to shower with just hot water.

I think it makes me fresher without losing -mones.

Learned this from an old Chinese zen-master who gets laid by young lasses a lot.

[**DONOTDELETE**]

Now I know why they call you Dr. Smell...Seriously, and all respect to the good doctor, who is very likely the exception that proves the rule, from the woman\'s point of view, this is not a good idea. I have two close girlfriends who have men in their lives (one a husband, one a live in SO) who think this is the way to do it, and both complain CONSTANTLY that their men reek, it distresses them no end. It\'s ruining their sex life. Please use soap. Please use deodorant. We can tell, honest to god we can.

[EXIT63]

I take a bath once a week. Whether I need it or not.

[franki]

Do you shower to or do you just take baths?

[CptKipling]

Ok this all sounds a bit crazy, DO SHOWER. The bacteria live on, how do you think SOE goes rancid so fast?

Deoderants kill smells, including pheros.

Take a shower (i do every day, cant imagine not and then going out in public) and use some shower gel or something.

I know that you end up washing away some of your musk smell, but it comes back! If your worried about this, dont shower thoroughly.

[**DONOTDELETE**]

Shower thoroughly with a wash cloth to exfoliate (makes your skin soft) and use a good deodorant. Trim your toenails. Keep your fingernails clean. Keep your teeth clean.

Women are really big on clean. We talk about you behind your back like you would not believe if you\'re funky, it\'s about the worst thing you can be. Trust me, you\'re musky enough even when you\'re clean.

[SwingerMD]

As for me I at least shower once per day. Now if I work in chlorine water (I teach swim lessons), I need to go through an entire list of things to make sure I don\'t reek like a bleach bottle later on (especially if I have a date later that night):
1. You gotta sweat it all out. 30-60 of excercise (on land) followed by a trip to the sauna will help ya sweat it all out.
2. Shower with a good antichlorine shampoo and conditioner.
3. Scrub your entire body with a good exfoliant (St. Ives apricot scub works wonders. It also ensures a close shave.)
4. One hour before date add appropriate pheros.

[**DONOTDELETE**]

Amen to that! Any man who doesn\'t get really close to the soap and water at least once a day is NOT getting really close to ME!

Yuck!! {{hurl!!}}

Heidi

[**DONOTDELETE**]

for rill

[druid]

Well I shower about 2 times a day. I sweat a LOT. I was just wondering what was the effect on those bacteria that live on your skin and interact with the pheros.

[**DONOTDELETE**]

Well, put it this way. \'mones or no \'mones, if you don\'t smell clean when you come to see me, we\'re gonna sit on the couch and chit chat all night and I might get a terrible headache and have to close up shop early. You\'re better off clean.

[SwingerMD]

Actually, I believe that it was discussed on another thread that the pheromones that we secrete naturally from our aprocrine glands are oderless. Now the bacteria on our skin break this down and turn it into some very nasty smelling stuff. So I would say take a good shower then put on the mones. There is no 12 hour wait (Unless you want to smell like fish bait!)

[upsidedown]

I would think that taking a shower should not make a difference. In the end, I think the pheromone products wer\'re all investing our hard earned dollars (or marks or francs etc.) are going to get the job done and make up for anything that we may wash off. Taking a shower will give us a nice clean canvas to use our phero products on.

[NoLimits]

OK - I\'m a morning shower person at the moment, but curious if there is a benefit to taking a shower at night. You would be clean and not be sweating while sleeping (unless you\'re having nightmares or something) and it would give you time to build up some pheromones and/or bacteria.

[**DONOTDELETE**]

Listen, my mother was the sexiest woman for miles and I ain\'t lying and that\'s what she did. She bathed before bed and when she woke up she washed her face and put on deodorant. She would also not wash her clothes every single time she wore them and you could walk into her closet and smell her and she smelled gorgeous. She used to fuss at me for \"washing [my] clothes to death.\" And I\'ve also been doing that for the past several days, bathing at night instead of in the morning. I don\'t care what she says, though, clothes still go in the hamper after I\'ve worn them once. :-)
Nobody around me seems to think I stink lately.

[SwingerMD]

Interesting. I also take a shower right before bed and wash my face and shave in the morning. I also don\'t wash my clothes everytime I wear them. I usually average wearing them 2 days. Depends on what I am doing in them or if I get anything on them.

The interesting thing is that the last person that I was actively dating said I smelled pretty good. She also pretty much said in the same breath that my brother reeked of too much cologne <font color=red>(Yeah!)<font color=black>. I also have found that she pretty much has one of the most sensitive noses when it comes to the pheros that I use.

[Watcher]

I will agree on the showering thing, twice a day for me because the smell can be bad. And it helps when applying pheros as well to have a clean smell as well.

www.anitadoth.com (\"http://www.anitadoth.com\")

[jose]

I take a shower once a day,in the morning. Scrub all that dead skin off my body,use shampoo conditioner and deodorant. Then apply the Pheromones 8 hours after the shower before meeting a date in the late afternoon or evening. If I remember my high school science class correctly, bacteria grows very rapidly like two to four hours.

[sabSpeaks]

Yeah, soap makes a trivial impact on the buildup of skin bacteria. The skin bacteria is what causes acne, and anti-bacterial soap certainly doesn\'t do a decent job of curing it.

I would advise people to wait at least 1.5 hours after a shower to apply pheromones.

Greg

[Irish]

I\'m with FTRH on this one. Some random thoughts:

1. Our society is extremely concerned with personal cleanliness - that\'s why the cosmetic/deodorant business is huge. You can argue about whether that\'s silly or not, but the perception is real. Civilized humans go to great lengths to remove or mask body odor. I\'m ok with that - I\'m am definitely not turned on by an unwashed woman, and I believe FTRH that women want clean men. As far back as Ovid the advice was for men to bathe frequently. Probably this is a learned cultural preference - not universal, but boy-oh-boy is it ingrained in Americans anyway. Perception becomes reality when it is widely held

2. Humans have scent glands - the apocrine glands mostly in armpit and groin but elsewhere too, intermixed with out eccrine (sweat) glands. The apocrine glands become active at puberty, and produce our familiar pheromones. Skin bacteria and skin chemicals modify our natural skin secretions into the smelly mix called BO. While this may have been attractive to our cave-dwelling ancestors, BO is generally frowned upon today (see 1.).

3. Our pheros (which we want to keep) are mixed in with the acids and other odorous skin byproducts (that society tells us stink and must be washed off). The two are hopelessly intermingled - you can\'t just wash off the stink and leave the pheros.

4. Enter the phero products we love so much here! They allow you to wash completely, then come back and add in your favorite phero. Even some of these products stink at concentration, so we add cologne to cover the smell of concentrated phero. But at least we\'re clean underneath! (society would be proud).

5. Don\'t worry about your own pheros being significant if you are using phero products. Your own phero production is miniscule compared to applied phero products. A spray of Andro4.2 for instance lays down about 250 times the none concentration that your armpit skin would ever produce. Your natural pheros are lost in the blast of about any applied phero product.


You may think you are preserving your own phero signature by not thoroughly washing. But if you are applying phero products you are greatly overwhelming any natural pheros anyway. All you\'re really preserving by incomplete washing is your natural BO.

[CptKipling]

Thank you, the sensible people are back in the building.

That smell was getting intrusive. /ubbthreads/images/icons/laugh.gif

[SwingerMD]

Certainly was /ubbthreads/images/icons/wink.gif . . . LOL.

[CptKipling]

Maybe the phero-con isnt such a good idea, with soap dodgers like this! lol /ubbthreads/images/icons/wink.gif

[SwingerMD]

Actually can you imagine the rxns with a room full of people wearing their favorite phero products. . . . /ubbthreads/images/icons/crazy.gif

[Andy]

Most people are forgetting the origin of regular washing/bathing rituals. Mostly it\'s rooted in the culture of ancient japan and they don\'t have had problems with girls afaik *g*. I think the root of evil is the use of shower gels and bath additions that are commonly used today. I prefer the japanese style bathing myself, means I take a quick shower followed by a hot bath (up to 45°Centigrade) in the evening. It\'s not only cleaning .. it\'s most refreshing and you just feel better after that. In the morning I usually take a really quick shower/wash my hair, before I start my day. In winter I often skip this part (except the hairwashing), because sweating between the sheets is no problem in that time of the year.

[DrSmellThis]

I still believe a hot shower, sans soap, freshens you up quite a bit, especially followed by a cold rinse.

Eventually you do need to use soap. But I do the above when I want a \"fresh effect\" without destroying the pheros.

I also use baby powder in my hair instead of shampoo on alternate days.

Women love this stuff, despite what they say.

I do take care of my health quite well, and haven\'t used deodorants or AP\'s for many years. All I ever get is \"you smell good.\"

This stuff about Love Scent pheros being all you need is bunk. We have hundreds of active pheromones. Supplementing 3 or 4 is a poor substitute, as is best seen as only one method (DHEA, tribulus, bathing habits, exercise, saunas, are others) of enhancing our phero profiles.

[**DONOTDELETE**]

Dr. SmellThis, I\'ve noticed from your posts that you are particularly careful about your diet, is that not true? and what one eats can affect how one smells, which is why I do believe you could be the exception that proves the rule.

[DrSmellThis]

Yes I watch my diet and health. I sauna to cleanse my pores.
However, I do eat meat.

Self-care should be the rule, not the exception.

One of the gifts men bring women is the chance to \"expand\" their preferences.

[Irish]

Dr. SmellThis wrote: \"This stuff about Love Scent pheros being all you need is bunk. We have hundreds of active pheromones. Supplementing 3 or 4 is a poor substitute, as is best seen as only one method (DHEA, tribulus, bathing habits, exercise, saunas, are others) of enhancing our phero profiles.\"
---------------------
Yes, yes - it would be ideal if we could turn up the volume on ALL our natural pheros, but my point in an earlier post is that is impractical, at least with the products we use now. My point is twofold:

1. Our skin doesn\'t just produce pheros, it produces culturally-discouraged odor as well, and the two are intermingled and inseparable. From D. Wolfgang-Kimball: \"…The substances produced by these glands are relatively imperceptible by the human nose; what we smell when we detect skin odor is not the fresh glandular secretions but rather the bacterial breakdown products…When degraded by enzymes and bacteria naturally present on human skin, free fatty acids result, including those that smell hircine and are generally regarded as unpleasant.\". To wash off the \'smelly\' byproducts that our society detests we unfortunately wash off our natural pheros as well. Personally I don\'t care if someone bathes or not, and hopefully they won\'t mind if I give them a wide berth. But the vast majority of socially-acceptable individuals will feel compelled to practice modern hygiene, which means they are going to remove their natural pheros in the process. If you can\'t keep your own phero \'signature\' without \'stinking\', and most people don\'t want to stink (societal disapproval), most people will be obliterating their own natural pheros with modern hygiene, an unfortunate side effect of stink-removal.

2. Even if you want to find some way around this, by balancing incomplete cleansing and degree of acceptable body odor in an effort to keep some of your natural pheros, that is still all nonsense if you are applying the commercial phero products we talk about here. Because the phero products we use overwhelm any naturally-occuring phero load on your body - by two orders of magnitude (refer to the Erox patent citing total natural phero load on the human body, or my archived posts on this subject for natural armpit phero load). One spray of any of the Lovescent products loads the skin hundreds of times more with phero than nature could produce on the entire body. In the practical sciences one order of magnitude difference makes the overwhelmed factor slip into irrelevance, and we are talking two orders of magnitude here. A whisper can be heard fine until the Metallica concert fires up, then the whisper is lost in the blare. And so your natural phero pattern is overwhelmed when you use these commercial phero supplements (unless you are diluting them a couple of hundred times before application). Hell, that\'s why we have to cover them with cologne, they are so concentrated compared to the natural. It doesn\'t make sense to speak of retaining your natural phero pattern with incomplete bathing, when you are smothering your natural pheros in a dose of applied commercial \'supplement\' anyway.

For those practicing modern thorough hygiene the only option is to add back in some applied pheros after washing - and I grant you at odd/unnatural ratios and concentrations, based on the limited products and info available to us.

Perhaps you don\'t care, or don\'t mind body odor in the mix. Or perhaps you are blessed in that your skin harbors no bacteria/enzymes that would break down secretions into typical BO. That would be a rare gift I fear, but in any case most of us will feel compelled to resort to soap and water, and a phero application afterward.

To each his own.

[**DONOTDELETE**]

\"One of the gifts men bring to women is the opportunity to expand their preferences.\"

If that line is working for you, good job. I\'d rather have lingerie -- and my limits respected.

[Gerund]

And I would rather *see* women receive gifts of lingerie... /ubbthreads/images/icons/smile.gif

[CptKipling]

I second that notion.

[DrSmellThis]

\"Overwhelmed\" is a dangerous concept because of the holistic effect of combining natural substances. Natural usbstances work in harmony way more often than opposition to each other. We need to think in a different way here. Small amounts of one thing enhance large amounts of another. Makers of herbal supplements, for example, recognize this.

You can discourage yucky bacteria by using essential oils, most of which are antibacterial and act as a protectant/medium for your natural pheros, and by using probiotics to supplement healthy bacteria, which tend to produce more pleasant smells. Much of the unpleasantness of bacteria comes from \"die off effects\". Bacteria eat nasty things from you which are released when they die. Reduced toxins = reduced bacteria smell. Healthy lifestyle helps immensely. I went through a huge detox program a while ago, and avoid unnatural products/toxins wherever possible.

\"Respect my limits\" is not what I\'m talking about, FTR, although I do wish I\'d told my mom to please respect my limits around spinach, peas, asparagus, beets, and brussel sprouts. /ubbthreads/images/icons/smile.gif I\'m almost sure you have met a wonderful man in the past who has expanded your mind beyond where it normally would have gone. Psychologically healthy people (such as yourself, I should presume) are continually modifying their tastes and preferences. The smell of a (healthy!) woman\'s armpits are extremely pleasant to me now, but I don\'t think I always realized this. When unnecesary, limits are like little prisons. Of course, crashing through someone\'s current limits against their will rarely works.

[Whitehall]

We evolved as small kinship groups of hunter/gatherers physically well isolated from other groups. As kin with the same diet, we all grew acustomed to our group\'s smell and could easily distinguish an outsider by smell. Those caves certainly stank to a newbie but smelled like home to the inhabitants.

Nowadays, we\'re crowded into huge anomynous masses of people where a strong scent is an affront to everyone\'s sense of privacy. It marks the stinker as someone apart and not belonging to the bigger society. Before urbanization, a person\'s smell was comforting to one\'s sense of belonging.

A related effect we often notice is that pheromones don\'t seem to affect those we already know well and usually work best on strangers.

So, for the sake of moving smoothly through modern American society, I take a shower every morning using sandalwood soap and wash my hair too. I wear fresh clothes and avoid, in so far as practicable, the extra scents from so many commercial products like laundry detergent.

To top it off, I\'ll use a complex cologne and a mix of pheromones selected for the targets anticipated and effects desired.

Borrowing from a different physical sense, \"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King.\"

[**DONOTDELETE**]

I\'m not sure I understand your analogy, since I am not a child; on the contrary, have been around the block a time or two and then some. While it\'s wonderful that a gift that men bring to women is expansion of their experience, whatever, I\'m saying, most of us would be far more delighted with more help with the housework or lingerie. Sometimes it\'s better and more productive for the relationship to accept that your partner is not interested in any more further expansion. However, I have had such dubious gifts pressed upon me and can\'t be quite rational on this subject, I\'ll grant you.

[DrSmellThis]

To each their own approach.

Those who equate smell with stink are missing something, however. I\'ll just say we do overdo bathing here in the west, and that bathing too often hinders your body\'s natural stink prevention mechanism. There is a middle path. I wish I had more time to go into this. I get way more hits on days I don\'t bathe. So do my friends.

By the way, the operative metaphor in the veggie example was not that it was a child. Yet that is the one you isolated, FTR. Our preferences grow and change throughout life. I just recently started liking asparagus, having already been around the block. I\'m sorry if I hit a sore spot. It was not my intent.

\"Forcing\" preferences on someone, of course, is a destructive act. This is not what I am talking about at all. More just being yourself, showing through positive example, providing available opportunities, demonstrating self-acceptance, and the like.

[**DONOTDELETE**]

Dr. ST, I thought about this on the drive home. A couple of things: your word carries some authority because of your occupation and you\'re well-respected on the forum. While it may be true and I can certainly quite imagine that it is true that you smell great using whatever hygeine practices you use or don\'t use, I guess I think that telling (especially) the boys on the forum they\'ll get more hits on days they don\'t wash is doing them a disservice. Teenaged boys smell like wet dog most of the time. (no offense to teenaged boys). I understand what you\'re saying about recently discovering the beauty of natural smells and I appreciate that you\'d like to expand everyone\'s horizons in that regard - I guess I think that one\'s personal smells are very intimate, and should be saved for intimate moments. I crave everything about the way my lover smells, arm pits, breath, you name it, and he uses all unscented products (except for baby powder :-)). But he\'s my lover. I\'m not sure I want to smell your pits or become so familiar as to smell your personal odors. Even if you offered me a whiff as a gift. :-)

Truce?

Sorry if I overreacted.

[EXIT63]

...Teenaged boys smell like wet dog most of the time. (no offense to teenaged boys)...

What about the wet dogs?

[DrSmellThis]

Perhaps we could all just get more in touch with our bodies\' smells, so we know when we stink or don\'t. If we do we do. If we don\'t we don\'t. But we needen\'t think we do just because we didn\'t shower today.

Where\'s jamboot?? /ubbthreads/images/icons/smile.gif