In honor of the upcoming Valentine’s Day holiday, I thought I’d share this cautionary tale of misplaced faith in contrived ways of attracting the opposite sex.  My husband K— and I have a friend, R—.  When he was a graduate student in chemistry, he was casting about for a way to pay for his education.  He heard about a study in which chimp sex hormones were successfully synthesized.  A few drops of the artificial hormones placed on the skin of a female chimp made male chimps, shall we say, uncontrollably amorous.  He got the brilliant idea of making a human sex hormone-based perfume that he would sell to nerdy chemistry grad students like himself to generate millions to pay his way through school.  (I might add that this was before the Sandra Bullock movie with something vaguely like the same plot came out.)

Figuring that chimp and human sex hormones couldn’t be too far apart, he found out the composition of the chimp concoction.   Having obtained all the chemistry required to replicate it, he set to work hopefully.  The one problem was that he didn’t have any information on the relative proportions of the chemicals that went into the chimp love potion or how the mixture was processed.  This is rather like having a recipe with ingredients but no quantities or baking instructions.  To take this analogy a little further, let’s say the ingredients in our recipe are flour and water.  Depending on how you mix those ingredients and what you do with them, you can get bread or you can get glue, so you see the problem.

R— began mixing chemicals in his chemistry lab.  Now, this seems a little irresponsible to me, but he was a graduate student in chemistry, so I have to assume he at least knew he wasn’t creating anything potentially explosive.  Explosivity, however, is probably easier to predict on paper than scent is.  The smell of the mixture wafted up toward him.  Expectantly, he took a deep breath…and nearly gagged.  He quickly slammed shut the fume hood and stepped back.  Not knowing what to do, he just left it there in the lab and walked away.  He swears that he returned five years later to find that it was still there.  No one had been willing to hazard a second whiff in order to clean it up.

The moral of the story is this: there’s such a thing as trying too hard.  Fact is, artificial enhancement rarely comes without undesirable side effects: leaky boobs, life-threatening erections, shrunken gonads, and uncontrollable flatulence, to name a few.*  I don’t know about you, but none of these are turn-ons in my book.

This Valentine’s Day, if you’re still in the mating, er, dating game, figure out what your natural strengths are and try to capitalize on them.  R—, our Love Potion No. 9 friend, might have been a nerdy chemistry grad student, but he is and probably always has been witty, intelligent, dedicated to helping people through his work, kind to animals, and a source of some damn good stories.  Needless to say, he and his significant other started their relationship with lengthy discussions of the health benefits of ingested plant compounds, not by exchanging nude photos at hotbods.com.

As for the love potion, it’s probably still stinking up the fume hood today, and R— found other ways of paying for college.  I guess before embarking on his project he should have heeded the lyrics to The Searchers' famous song:

I took my troubles down to Madam Ruth
You know—that gypsy with the gold-capped tooth
She’s got a pad down at Thirty-Fourth and Vine
Sellin’ little bottles of Love Potion Number Nine

I told her that I was a flop with chicks
I’ve been that way since Nineteen Fifty-Six
She looked at my palm and she made a magic sign
She said, “What you need is Love Potion Number Nine.”

She bent down and turned around and gave me a wink
She said, “I’m gonna make it up right here in the sink.”
It smelled like turpentine and looked like India ink
I held my nose, I closed my eyes, I took a drink

I didn’t know if it was day or night
I started kissin’ everything in sight
But when I kissed a cop down at Thirty-Fourth and Vine
He broke my little bottle of Love Potion Number Nine


*  From silicone implants, penis enlargement devices, steroids, and body-building protein supplements, respectively.