Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, October 5, 1993 TAG: 9310050107
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By RALPH VIGODA
DATELINE: PHILADELPHIA LENGTH: Long
Winnifred Cutler thinks she already has.
It's called Athena Pheromone 1013. And Cutler is selling it for $95 for one-sixth of an ounce.
And it's designed to . . . well, how shall we say this as one mature adult to another?
To be polite, it's designed to put romance back in a relationship.
To be blunt, if it leads to a close encounter of the horizontal kind, that's great.
Which is not the sole reason that Cutler developed her potion after two decades of studying women's health. She was more concerned with the overall well-being of women, she said. But after figuring out what she calls the formula for making females feel better about themselves and therefore more attractive to males, why not manufacture it?
Especially if helping a woman have more sex - which, in turn, sets off a chemical reaction that increases a woman's level of hormones and estrogen and heightens her fertility - is beneficial.
And before you dismiss Cutler as a snake-oil saleswoman - or argue that two full glasses of Chianti can have the same effect - you need to know that she is a 48-year-old University of Pennsylvania-educated scientist who has pioneered studies on women's health and authored a number of well-received books about women and their bodies, including volumes on menopause, hysterectomy and intimacy.
"Basically I'm a research scientist and a biologist, and I've made a discovery that led inevitably to the potential use of a product," said Cutler, who is president of the Athena Institute for Women's Wellness in Haverford Township, which she founded in 1986.
"This is very much the natural outcome of all the research I've done. What we're finding is it increases sexual attractiveness. We see women saying there's more sex behavior. It's increasing romance. I don't know if it's changing her confidence and what's she's signaling to him, or if there's a signal to him that's coming from the pheromone. But we do know it promotes sexual attractiveness."
How does she know? Because, she says, women who have been testing the product for the last few weeks are raving about the results. She says women have told her that their sex lives have been dramatically better.
Women like Lesley May, a nurse who just moved to Florida. A lawsuit involving her ex-husband, which caused mental stress and the onset of menopause, with its physical symptoms, had made her asexual for the last two years, she said.
"My sex drive had gone right out the window," said May, 51. "I had no feeling and no desire to have sex."
Familiar with Cutler's Athena Institute, May agreed to join the study and took a bottle with her when she left Pennsylvania three weeks ago. It wasn't until earlier this month, though, that she uncapped the potion, put it in her perfume, and dabbed it on.
The results, she said, were amazing.
"In two days I started having feeling in my genital area again, there was excitement about having sex and I'm orgasmic again," she said. "That's very exciting when you're 51."
Her fiance, John Perry, is also happy with the results.
"There certainly has been a change in her behavior since she started this," he said.
Scientists have long known about pheromones, chemical substances secreted by animals that affect the sexual physiology of another. It is, for instance, what makes male dogs chase females in heat. Logically, why can't the same thing occur in humans?
Cutler and her colleagues at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia spent much of the early 1980s studying the link between sexual behavior and the health of women. One of the conclusions was that women who had sex regularly had more normal menstrual cycles and a milder menopause than those who had infrequent sex.
In 1986 they announced that they had isolated the pheromones of men and women. Since then, said Cutler, she's been "sitting on it, figuring out how to test it, how to manufacture it, how to produce it in quantity. It takes a while to build a trademark, to go through the due process of law."
While the formula is a trade secret - she's applied for a patent - Cutler did say 1013 includes the human pheromone DHEA and SD 40 alcohol, a standard cosmetic ingredient.
For a while, she said, she was trying to work out an agreement with a cosmetic company, and part of that process included producing some bottles of the liquid, the ingredients of which are a secret. When the deal fell through, she said, she gave a bottle to a girlfriend who reported such astounding results that Cutler decided to push ahead on her own - although, she cautions, she does not expect every user to have such a dramatic reaction.
In the current test phase, Cutler is instructing women to put the pheromone in perfume, applying it as frequently as once a day just below the nose, on the wrists and behind the ears. Once a week the women are asked to send in their observations about Athena Pheromone 1013.
By the way, the "1013" has no scientific significance.
It's Cutler's birthday.
by CNB