Trending
It doesn't make scents.
Researchers claim that "male goat essence" is a real turn-on. A "goaty odor" doesn't just attract females, it entices them.
The report published in the journal Current Biology said eau de goat could be the amorous aromatic breakthrough we've been waiting for.
I'm not sure what to make of that. What I have learned is that researchers are the biggest class of practical jokers on the planet.
My theory is that "researchers" really are a bunch of bored 8-year-old boys telling silly stories and trying to discover what's the craziest thing they can make grownups believe. As long as an outlandish statement is followed by the words "researchers said," skeptics suddenly raise their hands and blurt, "Research shows that works? I've gotta do it. Thanks."
I might be wrong, of course. I'll have to research that.
I grew up on a small farm in the country. I spent what felt like a million hours in the barn, and never once do I recall sniffing anything out there that turned on amorous desires.
True, as a teenage boy, I always was thinking of girls. But when it came to barn scents, my head screamed, "I gotta get this barn smell off of me or the girls will wrinkle their noses and run when they smell me coming. Again."
A lot of farm things were romanticized for no reason I could puzzle out. For example, hayrides. I didn't understand the allure. Summers felt like endless hayrides. We called it baling hay.
Let me assure you, hay bales are big, hard blocks full of scratchy cut ends of dried grasses and weeds. In the fall, when some nut invited me go on a hayride, I'd yell "No, thanks!" and run. The person obviously was a researcher.
Of course, we didn't raise goats. Maybe my teenage years wouldn't have been so awkward if we had.
Deciding to become a researcher myself, I looked up some of the more, uh, unique perfumes and colognes actually on the market. Here's a sampling:
l Circus -- Dzing!, by L'Artisan Parfumeur, is a perfume that combines the aromas of caramel apples, sweaty performers, elephants and saddle leather.
l Horses -- If goats, why not horses? A business called For Strange Women Fragrance Co. has a scent that combines the essences of horses, hay, and oats. The also have one called November in the Temperate Deciduous Forest that smells like a forest cabin, leaves rotting on the ground and tree resins after a rain.
l Funeral -- Demeter, a company that produces all sorts of unique scents (I vote for their Play-Doh line), has one called Funeral Home, combining the fragrances of lilies, carnations, gladiolus and chrysanthemums with a hint of mahogany and oriental carpet.
l Bacon -- A scent by Fargginay offers the aura of frying bacon. Other perfumers sell scents ranging from Burger King to popcorn to angel food cake to blue cheese. Because what can help a diet more than smelling like food?
l Books -- Steidl manufactures a perfume called Paper Passion, which lights you up in bouquets of paper and inks. Because writers are a sexy bunch. Researchers said so.
— Get a whiff of Cole at burtseyeview@tribtoday.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.