I’ve been thinking about love potions lately. And no, the cause is not the usual rising of sap as the sun climbs higher in the sky. What set me off was this this article in the NY Times about a company in Boston, Gingko, that uses mRNA technology, the wizardry behind the Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines, to manufacture artificial scents. If a company wants to explore the option of buying say, rose scent, less expensively than wringing the life out of a trainload of roses, they can task the Gingko boffins to use templates and a lot of trial and error to come up with an artificial replacement. Makes sense to make scents. “Maybe the outputs from the first gene sequence are too floral, not spicy enough,” one Gingko lab rat says. No sweat, they simply keep plugging away until they get it right.

This kind of technology could prove extremely useful to the perfume industry whose dirty secret has been well, fairly dirty. Historically, some of its most popular notes have been derived from the anal sac of the civet (small cat-like animal), from the hairy pouch in front of a musk deer’s penis, and from a growth between a beaver’s pelvis and tail. I could go on.

Mainly, the perfume industry has moved on due to protests over ill treatment of animals, civets in particular. Kept in small cages and subjected to weekly painful scrapings of their anal sacs civets set the bar for lives that were nasty, brutish and short. Now, these scents are replicated by combinations of flower scents and recently by  synthetic sources such as Gingko. The point, however, is that the prototype scents are as basic as we can imagine

Or not. Ever heard of skatole and its connection to baby poop? Abandon your lunch ye who enter here.

Perfumers have explored the outer edge of scent possibilities, but what if the Gingko-like labs venture even further? What if they concoct synthetic scents even more basic that the above ones?  Scents so out there they were not meant for this world. Scents so swoonerific they may or may not come from unicorn ejaculate, werewolf chancres or leprechaun toe jam?

We get a sense of how powerful the base end of the scent scale can be from this quote from the author of the skatole article: “Despite opening the bottle well inside the fume hood I still caught a whiff of the stuff (skatole). My reaction was odd – two reactions, in fact. They were quite different: 1. ‘This stuff isn't so bad.’ 2. ‘Kill me’."

Perfume has come a long way from the early days of masking the evidence that your annual bath was overdue.  Look at modern fragrances like Opium by Yves St. Laurent or Black Heroin by Richard or Addiction by Fragrantica. I’m not sure an alluring scent, even one with supposed addictive properties, can be called a love potion. Not, that is, unless we’re talking about love of mankind. But a scent that’s specifically targeted to one’s OD, Object of Desire, could be.

Several ink lakes have been drained on articles about targeted medicine. We’re not there yet but the year is coming when a careful assessment of an individual’s genome will lead to boutique medicines that maximize an effective treatment based on that person’s genetic profile. Which of course begs the question of what else can be translated from genome to targeted cure, including cure for an OD’s lack of interest.  

But let’s look at the bigger picture here. First, we must assume that someone who resorts to a love potion is a shy, hesitant Walter Mitty type. Not a notch-in-the-belt kind of chap, he wants that love potion to give him a chance to win … what? A chance, a date, a kiss?

But what is a kiss but a quality control experiment, a mutual assessment of genetic compatibility. In fact, at the genetic level even chromosomes kiss. As one article has it: “inter-chromosomal interactions called “chromosome kissing” have been reported to control tissue-specific transcription and cell fate determination.” Couldn’t have put it better myself. Another article highlights research into how long a man’s DNA imprint persists in his smoochee’s mouth. Spoiler alert: at least an hour.

Perhaps it’s because Walter is a touch squeamish about all this business with tongues and lips and volume exchanges of saliva that he starts to wonder about cutting out the middle participants and simply have his genome call her genome. Such a scientific exchange and assessment would be more efficient than hours spent consuming gallons of female saliva in search of the saliva of the fittest.

Say goodbye to kissing a pondful of frogettes to find a princess. Through state-of-the-art DNA sampling and genome creation Walter can simply test and test again waiting for that green light. Surely it would be easier to walk up to OD’s desk and expound on the weather. But we live in a remote control age in which we’ll spend half an hour struggling through an ungainly chat system rather than call up and talk to a real support person.

At some level there probably is a genetic assessment aspect to any romance, especially if you subscribe to the theory that humans are simply a gene pool’s strategy for propagating their line. Whether it’s a search for a genetically robust mate or it’s a profound love, it’s difficult to see where the scent derived from the petrified feces of the rock hyrax comes in.