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The Scent of a Cat Woman

Is the secret to Chanel No. 5’s success a parasite?

By PATRICK HOUSE JULY 03, 2012 • 6:45 AM

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While creating Chanel No. 5, Coco resorted to an old perfumer’s trick: scrapings of sexual
pheromones from the perianal gland of the Abyssinian civet cat
Photograph by Thinkstock.

On the fifth day of the fifth month of 1921, Coco Chanel changed the scent of the world. She
released Chanel No. 5 as her final vaudeville act—her only child. The perfume would grow to be
“le monstre” of the perfume industry, a $300-per-ounce, elegant mist still anchoring the
multibillion-dollar Chanel empire. It succeeded where others had never tried by combining the
cheap, musky scent of the courtesan demi-mondaines—the “women of the half-world,” as Coco
herself was—with the light, single florals reserved for the upper class of Parisian women.
Needing a musky base note, Coco resorted to an old perfumer’s trick: scrapings of sexual
pheromones from the perianal gland of the Abyssinian civet cat.

Fast-forward to 1998. French chemists discovered something unexpected in a 1995 sauvignon

blanc from Bordeaux: 3-mercapto-3-methylbutan-1-ol, a grape breakdown product that doubles
as a fragrant pheromone in cat pee. We now know this is common to sauvignon blanc, and not
always unwelcome among wine critics: “Compare [cat pee] to an off-note that adds complexity
to a piece of music.” One New Zealand winery even named a bottle after the scent—“Cat’s Pee
on a Gooseberry Bush.”

Why is it that the elite French perfumers (known as “noses”) and sommeliers (“upturned
noses”) of the world spend so much of their time inhaling cat effluvia from expensive glass
bottles? A guess: It may have to do with a mind-control parasite called Toxoplasma gondii. The
tiny protozoan may be getting into our brains and tricking us into liking cats—not to mention
certain perfumes and wines.

In a recent study, Czech scientists gave men and women towels scented with the urine of
various animals—horses, lions, hyenas, cats, dogs—which they rated for “pleasantness.” Turns
out, men who tested positive for Toxo found the smell of cat urine more pleasant than men
without Toxo. For Toxo researchers like me, this was a shock but not entirely surprising. Why?
Toxo does approximately the same thing to rats.

Toxo reproduces only in a cat’s stomach and needs an intermediate host to taxi from one cat to
the next. Enter le rat. Toxo infects the rat brain and scrambles neurons to make the rat less
afraid of cat urine. How? The neural circuitry for fear is right next to the neural circuitry for
sexual attraction in male rats, and it seems Toxo can hijack the sexual attraction circuit to
respond to cat urine. A less-afraid (and maybe even a little turned-on) rat is thus a likelier-to-
be-eaten rat, allowing Toxo to settle in the new feline host and start the lifecycle anew.

Sometimes, though, Toxo ends up in a human’s brain (an evolutionary dead end for the parasite,
unless you are Val Kilmer), courtesy of forgetting to wash one’s hands after cleaning cat litter—
the parasite is in cat feces—or eating undercooked meat with Toxo in it—livestock often stomp
around on beds of fertilizer made from, yes, cat feces. Worldwide, 1 billion to 2 billion people
have the tiny Toxo parasite in their brains.

Once you play host to Toxo, you have it for life. But
unlike most anything else that finds a way into your
brain, it’s basically harmless as long as your immune
system is working and you aren’t pregnant. It’s
possible that Toxo is doing something to the host
human brain—we just don’t yet know what.

Now, maybe the men with Toxo from the Czech

study have pet cats at home (making them more
likely to pick up Toxo) and the cat pee evokes Elysian
fondness for their Fluffypuss. In this case, Toxo does
absolutely nothing but is still correlated with
preferring the smell of cat urine. Or maybe these
men with Toxo romantically incline to cat-ladies—women with Toxo might be more
promiscuous, after all.

Or maybe, like with the rats, Toxo is changing something about the way the brain processes cat
smells, making the men with Toxo find it more pleasant. Could it be that Toxo is the perfumer
par excellance, with privileged access to the very seat of smell itself? Is it a coincidence that “le
monstre” of the perfume industry and the Bordeaux sauvignon blanc both come from France, a
country with one of the highest rates of Toxo in the world?

Why would a perfumer spend her days perfecting aldehydes and tinctures to recreate the smell
of water at midnight when she could—if unintentionally—exploit the fact that 45 percent of her
French countrymen have parasites in their brains that may be skewing the inner, subjective
world of smell?

Musk gives durability and stubbornness to otherwise ephemeral scents in perfumes and
almost always comes from the dark nether regions of solitary animals, which is probably why
even the New York Times’ perfume critic Chandler Burr balks at the open-air smells of
Givaudan, one of the world’s great perfume schools. There are a few options for the perfumer:
Musk proper comes from sexual pheromones of a musk deer, castoreum (a musk alternative)
from urine-filled castor sacs of beavers, and civet from a sexual perianal gland the civet cat.
(The African civet cat is not technically a cat, in the Feline sense, but a Feliformia, a broader
class of “cat-like” carnivores that includes both cats and civet cats—though both prey on rats
and mark their territory with sexual and urinary pheromones.)

The history of perfume is an intimate history of animal come-hithers. Despite rampant

speculation the human pheromone, like dark matter, has yet to be discovered, let alone bottled
(“pheromone parties” in Los Angeles and New York notwithstanding.) So instead we outsource
production to animals. But why some over others? It may be a coincidence, but it is nevertheless
worthy of note that in ancient Egypt, home of the world’s first perfumers, home of some of the
earliest domesticated cats, where the penalty for killing cats was death, where it was a crime to
not save a cat from a burning building, Bastet served as god of both perfume and cats.

Clearly most of these ideas are unprovable, a fancy feast of unfalsifiable theory—often both the
most interesting and the most useless line of inquiry for the scientist. Do civets and domestic
cats use similar pheromones? Unknown. Is Toxo really altering human response to cat odors,
like in the rats? Unknown. Do people with Toxo prefer Chanel No. 5 over those without Toxo?
We may never know. Chanel stopped using civet in 1998 in No. 5 for animal rights reasons,
replacing it with a synthetic version (though you can still buy vintage). No word on if the new
No. 5 is any less popular.

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As a company, Chanel marks its territory like a cat does its palm fronds. Decades of
spokesmodels from Keira Knightley to Audrey Tautou to Nicole Kidman all leave an elegant
Chanel No. 5 sillage in their wake long after they leave both the room and their suitors behind.
Marilyn Monroe, arch-queen of the human come-hither, claims she wore to bed nothing but
“two drops of Chanel No. 5.” Perhaps instead we should think of her bedroom as not her own
territory, nor DiMaggio’s, nor Arthur Miller’s, nor JFK’s—but, rather, the extended territory of a
lonely civet cat.

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