“It’s summer in Washington, D.C., so no one smells all that great. But this night was different from your average gathering of sweaty bodies. I was about to enter a pheromone party, where strangers would be inhaling my scent via a T-shirt I’d been wearing. It’s a fun if strange experiment. Singles are meeting in lots of odd ways these days. Perhaps sampling each other’s DNA the way you might go wine-tasting makes more sense than swiping through photos on a dating app.

“It’s a lovely experience to not visually judge someone – to smell someone before you see them,” said Amy Morse, who organized the pheromone party with Pakke, a new D.C. arts organization she co-founded.”