Very nice journal! It got my first subscription on the men’s section… 
Great journal you have there Vanadium. Glad to see you’re back. Looking forward to read more of you.
Thanks.
I especially appreciate it now, because when I re-read my old entries from 2013/2014, I’m really embarrassed by how wordy I was. Often I was tired after a long night (I don’t feel comfortable reporting intimate encounters, just the initial phero “introduction”)
I spent 2015 working through my last pheros order of late 2014, but I plan to start a completely new experimental series soon. I’m amazed/puzzled by the number (but not magnitude) of results some report here – i.e. how many mixes they report on. How many thousand sprays a year does that add up to?
I don’t personally wear pheros more than few days a week, because a) I like to keep firmly in touch with my baseline, and b) I believe that, as with medicines, any strong effect risks unintended [social] side effects. There are only 52 weeks in a year, so at 2-4 trials a week, divided by 10 tests for each mix (a very minimal sampling IMHO), it takes me a year or more to BEGIN to feel like I truly know what I’m experiencing with a given set of sprays. But I suppose I could argue that since one can only paint so many pictures in a year, it may be silly to dwell in refining one set of pigments. Some artists prefer to use their entire palette in a more intuitive/less rigorous way.
I’ll try to compile my 2015 findings into cohesive results (if I find truly compelling trends that aren’t already common wisdom). In the meantime, I find myself quite excited by the prospect of completely new trial series, with new agents, in 2016.
Welcome back and I look forward to reading all your experience.
Even if you are a physician yourself (as I was), the messed-up US medical insurance system can force you to change your primary care physician by making it expensive not to change (and prohibitively expensive, by declining to cover any specialty referrals or procedures they recommend).
In situations like this, plain Instant Gentleman (at a somewhat higher dose than usual), without any additives (since you may not know very much about the new doctor, even after asking your colleagues), is an excellent way to convey the message “I am to be taken seriously and respected – and liked!”.
This can be a life-changing tip: even a good physician (lawyer, etc.) often unconsciously does a MUCH better job for your case if they feel a special respect/connection/bond/etc. with you. I’ve seen this countless times. It’s just human nature, however noble/ethical they may be.
Don’t plan a “first office visit” mix with an eye to seducing a nurse, receptionist, staffer. Aim toward a firm ‘serious’ impression on the physician/lawyer, etc. Also: formally prepare a presentation/plan of expectations/etc. Few devote any effort to preparing anything at all, much less refining/practicing it This may easily [someday, unexpectedly] end up being more vital to your life than any sales pitch, interview or first date that you sweat over endlessly.
I wish this weren’t true. Doctors [or lawyers] should do their absolute best in every single case (and we WANT to), but we unconsciously sort for diverse reasons, despite our best honest intentions. This is yet another area of life where “stacking the deck” of first/subsequent impression via pheromones can play off HUGE.
Good tip. Good way to get some kind of an ROI with pheromone testing/using. 
Thanks for sharing your inside experience from a doctor’s point of view, very interesting .
However, the strategy to actually ‘get to see the doctor’ is very different in a health system that’s not free-market based or insurance-based like United States’ health system. In a “universal” health system (i.e. “free”), it’s a subtle game that I am barely starting to master after years of moneless life experience. The dispatch nurse plays a great role on the time you’ll spend waiting, and she is not to be neglected in the process. I am convinced that mild seduction and charisma with the head nurse is key in my particular health system.
Wether you look serious to the doctor or not, you’ll need to reapply product if you spend 10-12 hours in the waiting room to see him before he can judge on this. My record wait for a doctor - ever - was 16 hours and they finally did let me pass through when I started coughing blood. The typical waiting time has been averaging 8-10 hours for years of moneless experience. This average went down to 1 hour since I have been using mones and, believe me, the system in itself has not improved. Nowadays, when I leave the place to go home, I pass in front of the waiting room and most people that were there when I came in are still there waiting .
You can get the same respect/connection/bond from A314/TAC/Hedione than with IG. The result is also warmer and more human than with IG, especially with the Royale version of A314. Plus, it works miracles on the ladies (including nurses) and makes the waiting room experience much more pleasant .
I used A314 solo at my most recent doctor’s visit. It was interesting. I noticed he made a mistake in refilling an old prescription. Fortunately it was in my favor in the sense that I don’t need to see him for a while for another refill. Possibly a slight intimidation factor, but IG is an excellent recommendation since it’s much more social than A314. I’ll have to give that a try next time. Yeah, IG solo would be an excellent choice for professional meetings.
Thank you, Conjurator, for reminding me: I should remind my readers from time to time that, though I am somewhat older than many of you, my biological signature has always been strong in certain pheromones. I have to be careful when using many pheromones or mixes that are often called “alpha” (not to be confused with the organic structure designation “alpha”) or “sexual”.
In my teens/20s, I experienced starling (even to me) responses, both positive and negative, from y natural pheros. In my mid-late 20s (and into my 30s) I found Jovan Andron strikingly effective, both when I was single and as a family man – I became convinced it worked BUT also had enough otherwise inexplicably negative reactions in specific individuals to cloud my results and make me wary of ‘overdoing it’. As I age, my inevitably declining pheromone output actually makes it easier to discern exact results than it was even 5 years ago.
I agree that others may not want to go with IG alone, especially if they are college or grad school age [or are focused primarily on sex, at the risk of some negative responses], but only your own testing can determine if it is effective for you and your purposes. IG and the more friendly/social mones/mixes definitely remain the safest place for ME to start – but that may change in my mid-late 50s.
Sorry for my long absence!
Life has intervened – and not in a way that has been conducive to experimentation (e.g. my elderly parents have been in/out of the hospital, ICU, skilled nursing facilities this year, and I had to convert two rooms of my house into basically a mini-ward – and the hospitalizations and renovations were just the start of my issues!)
I definitely stand by my suggestion to wear pheros when seeing your doctor. I changed insurance [and hence doctors] at the start of the year, and my new Primary turns out to be a friend of mine from med school. I had to see him several times this year, and was accustomed to a certain style of interaction, but I forgot to wear pheros this last time, and the session felt strikingly different. It was just a matter of the mood, and didn’t affect anything material in this case – but I won’t forget again!
I’ve also had to wrestle extensively with other physicians over my parents’ care. I tell you, I don’t know how non-physicians handle it. Though I don’t practice, I’m fluent in the lingo of each of the subspecialists, and some of the attendings had known of me when I was a honcho in the state medical board, long ago, or had trained under my father, who had been a medical school professor for 50 years – yet it was still a challenge to get them to truly listen and accommodate my parents’ needs. Were I a layman --even a high-flying bigshot, accustomed to getting the best-- I’d almost certainly have been gently persuaded they were doing the very most they could, while they were really doing just a little more than their usual protocols. It’s not that they aren’t trying, but there’s a mystical difference between “trying hard” and actually getting it done.
It’s not unlike the difference between impressing the heck out of a lady in every enumerable way VS. having her decide she’s going home with you before she really knows how sensitive, funny, successful and caring you are. Most of us have both caught and missed that mystical train, and have spent many hours asking “What just happened? What did I do right (or wrong)?” It’s the same with doctors: they may try very hard to accommodate you – or they may “get into bed” with you, not sure how/why/when they decided they WOULD do what you asked, by hook or crook.
But enough about that. Let’s talk pheros!
Though I did less experimentation this past year than I’d planned to, and despite the fact that I take a long time to reach conclusions (seriously, how much good science is done in a dozen or two trials – precious little. Yet how many weeks are there in a year? How many trials can one (wo)man do? That’s why we need this group!), I did manage to come up with a few points worth sharing.
Let’s start with an observation about HEDIONE. I have always be unable to smell it. Seriously, I could put my nose over the bottle and take a deep whiff and sense nothing. It might as well have been water. In fact, though I got it from a reputable source [Perfumer’s Apprentice], I sometimes cynically wondered if I hadn’t gotten a null batch. At the very least, I was a bit uncomfortable applying hedione with no sense of how strong a scent I was applying. Was it weak or did it reek?
I know many of you are in the same boat, and it turns out to be curable. Just as many men (we tend to have less sensitive noses) learn to smell various pheromones after long exposure to our own applications, you can learn to smell hedione. One day, in a rush, I spilled a little (maybe 2-3 mL) at my desk at home. Fortunately, I had spread a paper towel to catch any overspray – but it wasn’t enough! A few droplets soaked through onto some important papers (just my own records, than goodness!). I removed what I could, and filed the papers away.
After a few days, I began to smell something (quite intrusive actually) which turned out to be the towel buried in my waste basket. I realized I was onto something and kept the towel when I emptied the wastebasket. It was a tough month or so (I really began to resent that smell) but it was worth it. I can now smell hedione, even on the records I filed a year ago, and it’s no longer annoying.
But I can tell you this: 1 mL is definitely WAY too much. Though I don’t know if skin modulates it, as with so many perfumes, I’d worry that even 3-5 drops on warm skin might evaporate quickly and be obtrusive to women who can smell it “naturally”. Yet based on the many 20-spritz phero combos I’ve seen posted here, I bet some guys who can’t smell it are applying that much or more, thinking “It can’t hurt!”
I am very sorry to hear about your parents, and I hope they do get better. They sound like they have trained and done so much in the medical field, and this is how they get treated? I don’t blame you and would be pissed to.
It took me a long time, but I can smell Hedione, but barely. I really like you accident/test to smell the hedione! I may try dabbing a paper towel with some and put it in a cabinet or something to see what it does. Thanks for sharing that.
Count my prayers too for your parents. 
Damn. I had a long post typed on P95, but NoScript detected a “cross-scripting attack” (falsely, I assume) and the post got lost during submission.
I’ll try again after the next NoScript update.
Oh that’s sad. A P95 would sure be a nice read.
One of the few good things about the disarray of this past year is that it allowed me to do “more blinded” tests than I might otherwise have done. I made my list at the end of 2015, but didn’t get around to placing the order for months, by the time I tried them, I’d forgotten the reputations of each number.
For example, I don’t know what made me put P75 on my list. Though I am naturally jocular and casual, I have always had a rather “aggressive”, sexual- and status-heavy natural signature, which has led to some significant, needless friction over the years and actually led to a policy of showering (when I could) before some key meetings. Though I’m sure that sig has attenuated with age, my experiments have been heavily in the range of “feel-good” socials. P75 is the type of phero I would ordinarily avoid.
However, when I tried straight P75 “blind” (2 sprays of 2.5 mcg], I found that it was definitely an effect I could work with, perhaps because I had grown accustomed to managing a strong assertive signature all through my younger years. It did the job of fixing the focus on me, and one I had their attention, I knew what to do with it.
Though it has a very dissimilar feel to my usual base of IG/IS, I could see using P75 as my daily base, it least at that dose (or 1 spr in a mix). I don’t know that I’d want to go higher and risk the tedious consequnces others have reported. Been there (with my natural sig), done that.
I did notice a certain Spockian ‘logical’ detachment, which I had from time to time in my youth (and which hadn’t always served me particularly well socially: even my close friends seemed a bit intimidated), and a distinctly different detached-contemplative focus, akin to meditation. The latter is useful: I found I didn’t get bored or irritated while waiting, something I was prone to until I learned to meditate while waiting.
It’s definitely not a vibe I would want to push very hard. but surprisingly useful and manageable. The silage was relatively short-ranged (3-5 ft/1-1.5m) but with a sharp onset at that range, almost like a force field.
Others have commented on the “focus” it provides, but I noted a downside: it caused a premature focus on initial choices which isn’t always favorable in creative problem solving in settings like repair work; routing around heavy traffic in moderately familiar city areas; online comparison shopping; and diagnosis (ordinarily a strength). Perhaps this is because I have long ago developed my own style of deliberate hyperfocus (as many people do) and this phero wasn’t compatible with that. I rarely have to ‘start over’ the branching choices I make in decisions, but I had to do so several times under the influence of P75. It was quite striking.
In fact, thinking about it now, this latter effect is enough to make me carefully limit my future experiments with P75. I do a lot of creative problem-solving (it’s like math: not a big subject in most people’s lives, but if you’re good at it, you see opportunities to use it everywhere), and not all errors are so easily reversed. Also, I’d worry that it might cause those around me to “fixate on the early branch-paths”, a trait creative thinkers learn to hate.
Still, I found its “attention-grabbing” and status properties striking enough that it shouldn’t be overlooked. People definitely don’t get in your way when you’re wearing it, and often scurry to accommodate you.
Just don’t overdo it. Admittedly, this is more a concern with my base signature (I’ve read of people using up to 60mcg(!) base), but if P75 were a color, scent or sound, it would be one associated with personally distasteful episodes in my life. It’s useful, but comes with a warning.
thanks for the great write up as you have articulated my exact same impressions of p75.
ive found that while i may find it easy to focus on individuals, analytical problem solving is impaired and i suffer a come down from p75. it definitely magnifies add for me in terms of task tracking.
so while it is great fun at work, working with it on is difficult unless the work is primarily social.
my effective use cases are charitable events, team building, flirting and the ability to retain staus while being playful…
This goes against prevailing wisdom, so please take it with a whole shaker of salt.
I’m just raising this as a topic for discussion. I think there’s a LOT to discuss here. In fact, I may start a thread in “Studies & Abstracts” with diverse citations from the scientific literature .
It is well accepted here that “old/stale” (bacterially metabolized; degraded by local skin pH, ordinary oxidation, etc.) is unattractive or even potentially repellent. It is generally advised that one wash oneself well after an application. I think this is generally a good idea, but maybe we should look more closely at "why.
I’m basing this on years of notes where I specifically noted that overspray or residual scent (i.e. detectable by me, even though I’m hardly a “golden nose”) on recently-worn clothing seemed to still have a distinctly positive effect vs a ‘fresh shirt’. I’m talking about clean clothes that I may have only worn 2-6 hours (maybe a little longer in cool/evening settings) for a specific event/meeting, but which I put back on the hanger as “still clean”.
That practice may strike some of you as disgusting. Fine. Be glad that I did it, so you don’t have to. It’s a longstanding habit, not from my college bachelor days, but from medical school (though I’m sure many student physicians would also find it odd).
In my day (and in many US programs today), surgeons, surgical residents, students on surgical rotations, etc. were not allowed to wear scrubs outside the “restricted surgical areas” (Operating Rooms, Recovery Suite, Surgical Locker Room and the areas in-between), but physicians/residents/students on other services could wear scrubs anywhere in the hospital (wearing them outside the hospital wards, such as tossing a clinical jacket over them to go out for lunch, was justifiably frowned upon but was nonetheless fairly common). You were expected to keep at least one set of dress clothes on hand for clinics, wards, lectures, etc. (not that students, or even many residents, were given a place to keep them!) On top of that: many of us used harsh laundry methods (hot water, bleaches, etc.) at home to sterilize out weekly wear for the sake of our families/etc. Hospital scrubs, made for and washed by, outside services are built to withstand years of harsh washing; normal cotton dress shirts/tie/pants visibly fade or weaken after as few as a dozen cycles. As a poor student, I started to ask myself if a few hours of ‘clean’ duty in an air-conditioned walk-in clinic really warranted a harsh wash, or if it was still good for a total 12-36 hours of use. (12 may be normal for you, but students/residents are on duty for 36+ hrs on “on-call” days, and can’t go home to change). I decided “if it’s still crisp/clean-looking, It’s good enough.”
Maybe I’m just a slob, but I think it’s a personal choice we just don’t talk much about.
Flashforward 30 years: I still think that way. I no longer work in hospitals (teeming with bacteria and random sprays of disgusting bodily fluids), so what’s the difference between a formal shirt I wear for 6-8hrs in 3-5 meetings in a week, and a shirt at hour 8 of a 7am-7pm workday? Or the golf shirt/blazer I tossed on for a 2hr power lunch, though I wore a dress shirt/tie the rest of the day? (It’s contemporary fashion thing here. I’m no expert, but I’ll try to dig up a paper I saw that showed wearing casual clothes to a luxury car test drive/negotiation gave better results than dress clothes)
There may very well be one, for all the reasons I mentioned. A sweaty shirt ferments; a not-noticibly sweaty shirt may ferment too, even in an AC-cooled closet. Then again, it may ferment *differently – beer, wines, cheeses, breads, olives, kimchi all prove some fermentations are delicious
I’m sure that a lot of it has to do with personal physiology. Generally I consider it wise for men to shower as often as they reasonably can. I know that at some points in my life I was more prone to “stink” than at others – diet, stress, and a number of other factors weigh into this. There’s some evidence that many people who bath once a week or less develop a skin ecology that doesn’t tend to stink. Others, however, stink fast and don’t know it.
OTOH, frequent washing tends to raise (alkalinize) skin pH from a normal 5.5 to 6.5 or more (water is 7.0; soaps and skin products can be even higher). Many people with body odor problems find that “gently acidifying” their skin with mild acids like citric acid, especially in intertriginous zones (“fold/overlap” areas like the armpit/groin/etc.). Why? Partly because a more acidic environment supports skin-specific bacteria vs any random bacteria that happens along – it’s a matter of microfloral ecology mix, and may take weeks/months to change, much like the “gut probiotics” pushed by the yogurt industry and medical fecal transplants (yes, that’s exactly what it sounds like) used in extreme cases of imbalance, such as after pseudomembranous Clostridium difficile infections. OTOH, some people are TOO acidic, and quickly breakdown many molecules into “stink”.
Also consider that pheromones “in the wild” (non-human animals) work just fine despite natural chemical breakdown and the lack of lilac bubble baths.
I don’t want to go on too much further in this post, so I’ll just mention a few points:
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I noticed this effect most strongly with nonsteroidal fragrance elements like oak moss, hedione, ambergris and partially steroidal musks, but I also saw it with the pure steroidal AD pheromones. Without going to far into biochem, steroids are [specific] linked carbon rings with a occasional O or N atom in a ring, and other chemical groups hanging off the rings. It’s much mre specific than that, but my point is: steroid [derived] pheros are a small group of molecules with a very particular chemistry.
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I think it’s clear that the typical AD user uses higher doses than the “natural background”: many spitzes of on phero, a 7-spritz mix, or more concentrated sprays (e.g. 12.mcg or more/spritz). If our 20s (or 30s or 50s) lasted 100 years, instead of 10, we might have more time to explore the subtleties of nanogram-range mixes (where I suspect the real magic of steering/personalization may be hiding), but let’s face it, we tend to the heavy side in our usage. We want visible results, and stronger doses seem the easy way to get there. That’s not necessarily true, just as it isn’t true with medicines (for different reasons) but it seems to be how most people are betting. Maybe the second day “afterglow” of a high dose usage works as well or better because it’s equivalent to a lower initial dose: same effect, less side-effects.
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I do shower between applications. I believe, however, hat there’s a difference between on-clothes and on-skin applications, especially with regard to breakdown
Again, this is only the very start of a discussion, so please comment.
I will admit that sometimes after I shower I put on a basic T shirt then in the morning change into my work clothes and then later on in the evening I go home and shower and put that same T shirt on. Sometimes I do this for a few days I will admit it, so just know that you are not the only one that does this.
There is something to this with natural bacteria on your skin. I have found your health and especially your immune system, mood, and hormone balance play a very important role in all of this. I have put reports up in my journal about this and Jdub has also mentioned things around this area as well.
The big key for me is to just try and be the very best me I can be and that means to be complete and take care of myself.
Very nice report BTW.
Thanks, but your mention of “report” made me realize that I left out any actual specific observations (the post was getting long)
One application that I used for months was oak moss on the top of the collar of a fall/winter jacket near the back of my neck. I initially did this because I was interested in experimenting with oak moss, but was concerned about the possibility of skin irritation, which is uncommon, but occurs in enough people ~1% or so) to have this centuries-old perfumers ingredient removed from all commercial scents in the 1990s (2000s?). Extended testing has since shown that it doesn’t irritate MY skin and I note that the FDA still lists oak moss as an allowable food additive, so the few ill-effects are probably minor. Still, use care in your personal testing
Also note that the “testing for months” was somewhat involuntary: the stuff is potent and the several drops I applied to my collar lasted for weeks or longer. Oak moss has impressive silage. One cold fall day, immediately after application, I did my routine pre-winter maintenance on my car in my indoor garage, getting literally “hot under the collar” (that jacket was a bit too warm for fall weather) as I hauled out the compressor, rotated my tires, etc. The next day, I picked up my “trail” from the day before, in the downstairs hallway on the way into the garage. I was the only person home that weekend, and I usually enter through the front door, not the garage, so there hadn’t been any “traffic” to dispel the trail
On that day, the trail wasn’t unpleasant or intrusive. It was actually rather nice – but it was definitely noticeable. I worried that the trail my rear collar left behind me might have been too strong the day before (I had been at a social event the night before, with no signs it was off-putting, but better safe than sorry) I put the jacket away. When I started wearing it again a month or so later, I could still detect the scent on the collar, but the silage was down to much more “normal subliminal levels” - I could still faintly whiff the silage, after coming in from chopping some wood, but mostly because I was deliberately looking for it.
It’s a good ingredient for me, especially in the New England winter when cold dry air attenuates most scents. I should experiment with it more, but I keep it in a sealed drawer with other potent scents, so I rarely remember it when choosing my phero mix. Maybe I’ll remember the collar trick this fall.
A more recent incident was with hedione + phero overspray (P86+P75 over my base IG+IS). My dad had gone to the ER the night before with breathing difficulties (nothing too serious, given his age). In the morning, my mother called to say he was being admitted, and needed some stuff from home. Naturally, I wasn’t worrying about my “presentation”, I just grabbed “last night’s shirt” and rushed over.
My dad’s assigned ER nurse was brusque: not rude, but rushed, unhelpful and a little condescending. Apparently she’d been that way all morning, and I saw it myself during the 2+ hours we waited for a room assignment on the ward. She remained brusque during the long corridor walk from the ER extension to the opposite end of the main hospital, but in the close quarters of the elevator, her mood began to change. By the time she left, after transferring him into his new bed, doing the work-up and paperwork, etc. (about 15 minutes), she was smiling/friendly, even winking at me.
As many have noted, hedione is a good potentiator of pheros, along with its own beautifying/uplifting effects
On a different note, I’ve had mixed results with musks. One must always be cautious with them: they may be pleasant when fresh and diluted, but pungent and repulsive if they become too concentrated, oxidize, etc. This creates problems with on-clothing applications.
Many so-called musks and musk oils are now synthetic, which is fine [a molecule is a molecule wherever it comes from, and synthetic products can be purer, more predictable, and stabler than animal-harvested extracts] but even the synthetics can smell bad if they become too concentrated due to diffusion, evaporation or absorption of the carrier, and natural musks can be trickier. They also often “sticK”, meaning they are hard to completely wash off or wash out of clothes. Don’t be fooled if a shirt collar smells pleasant straight out of the laundry, the carrier oils may be gone, and the smell may change as residual water dries out. Musks can also stain collars.
I like some musk-based or -scented colognes, but I rarely experiment with natural musk oils (esp directly on skin) unless I am feeling really reckless. I leave the delicate balance to the professional perfumers. Jasmine or Hedione have more immediate upside with little risk, but I know guys who swear by musks as an attractant. YMMV
Oakmoss has been on my wantlist forever. I must get me some.