Ok, this is crazy. The latest male dating hack says you can attract women by abandoning showers, deodorant and clean clothes.

Men have spent decades being told to shower before a date. Wash your hair. Brush your teeth. Put on clean clothes. Apply deodorant. Maybe even use a tiny amount of aftershave, rather than emptying half a bottle of Lynx Africa, aka, Never Fail, and hoping to meet Miss Right.

Now TikTok has arrived with a different plan: stop washing.

The trend is called “pheromone-maxxing”. It is aimed mostly at young men and has been circulating through the online looksmaxxing and manosphere ecosystem. The theory is simple, if not particularly aromatic. Modern hygiene supposedly masks a man’s natural pheromones, so skipping showers and deodorant will make his “natural musk” more sexually attractive.

In other words, if a woman does not fancy you, perhaps the problem is not your personality, lame conversation or habit of referring to yourself in the third-person. No, it’s you just smell too clean.

What Is Pheromone-Maxxing?

The trend has been reported by Vice, News.com.au, Nine and other outlets. Some of the online content encourages men to skip showers, avoid deodorant and wear unwashed clothes before dates. The more committed practitioners apparently want their body odour to build up until it becomes an irresistible biological message to the opposite sex to procreate.

The message may be biological. It may also be: “Please open a window.”

And because no internet trend is complete until somebody makes it dangerous, some extreme posts have reportedly encouraged men to drink their own urine to increase pheromone production. This is not a sentence I expected to write before breakfast, but here we are.

It is worth pointing out that not every video is necessarily genuine. Some of the accounts pushing pheromone-maxxing may be joking, rage-baiting or simply trying to generate views by behaving like a rejected extra from The Lord of the Rings. The difficulty is that irony is not always obvious online, particularly when the audience consists of insecure young men looking for a simple answer to a complicated problem. That is what makes the trend more interesting than a story about teenagers who smell bad.

The Bigger “Maxxing” Obsession

Pheromone-maxxing is the latest expression of a broader male obsession with optimisation. Looksmaxxing tells men to improve their faces. T-maxxing tells them to improve their testosterone. Fitness influencers tell them to improve their bodies. Dating gurus tell them to improve their status, confidence and ability to manipulate women.

You can read our recent story about the Pentagon’s testosterone panic for a more serious example of the same impulse: the belief that every problem in a man’s life can be identified, measured and corrected with the right biological setting.

Pheromone-maxxing is the budget version. No gym membership. No blood test. No expensive clinic. Just stop showering and wait for female desire to bloom.

Is There Any Science Behind It?

There is a small, tiny, teeny-weeny grain of truth buried under the the smelly rubbish. Human beings can respond to smells, and body odour can influence how someone perceives another person. By 2026, the global luxury fragrance market hit €57.28 billion, just by the way.

But there is no clear evidence of a reliable human sex pheromone that makes women suddenly abandon all judgement and follow a sweaty man into the night. Vice’s report notes that the existence of a human pheromone remains unproven.

That is an important distinction. Natural scent is not the same as refusing to wash your clothes for three weeks. A man can smell like himself without smelling like a sweaty gym bag that has been left in a hot car. There is a difference between being attractive and requiring the emergency services.

Nobody has ever finished a date and said: “He was fascinating. I loved the way his bacteria interacted with my nostrils while eating.”

The truly revealing part of pheromone-maxxing is the shortcut. It offers men a way to avoid the frightening, humiliating work of becoming more confident, more engaging and better at talking to another human being.

If a date goes badly, it is easier to blame deodorant than admit you spent two hours explaining a pump-and-dump cryptocurrency scheme to someone who a girl who asked about your hobbies.

Men have always been sold shortcuts. Pills, powders, testosterone boosters, jaw exercisers, cold plunges, obscure breathing techniques and now the bold promise that women are waiting for a man who smells faintly of damp carpet.

One Last Thing

If you are going on a date, shower. Wear clean clothes. Brush your teeth. Use deodorant. Do not drink urine. Try to be funny without making the other person uncomfortable. Ask about them. Listen. Be kind.

Oh, and if you are still struggling, our guide to the phrases that make women angry will probably help more than marinating in your own T-shirt.