A pair of New York artists have created a unique dating service that relies on body odour to find potential couples.

Smell Dating, which calls itself "the first mail odor dating service", has been created by Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne of Useless Press, an experimental digital art group.

Singletons interested in the service just need to sign up and pay a one-off fee of $25. They then receive a t-shirt in the mail and are instructed to wear it for three days, while steering clear of deodorants, perfumes, or other artificial things that could affect their bodies' natural odours.



Once the three days are up, they send the t-shirt back, and later recieve the t-shirts of 10 other participants in the mail.

They can then carefully smell each t-shirt, determining which they like the most. If two participants like the smell of each other, Smell Dating will give them the other's contact information. After that, love is left to take its course.

Explaining their decision to build a dating service on unwashed t-shirts, Smell Dating say on their website: "Unlike sight and sound, smell is interpreted first in terms of memory and emotion before being mapped to language."

The site says: "The internet has replaced fleshy experience with flat apparitions, avatars and painstakingly curated profile pics. Smell Dating closes digital distance by restoring your molecular intuition. Our members make connections via deeply intuitives cues, perfected in the ancient laboratory of human evolution."

"Surrender yourself to a poignant experience of body odour."

Interestingly, Smell Dating collects no personal information from its members, not even seemingly vital details like gender, sexual orientation or age. Participants are instead encouraged to trust their instincts to find the best match, getting rid of any prejudicial cultural images that can affect their feelings.

To be clear, Smell Dating isn't going to be the next Tinder - it's an artistic project, and the whole thing is limited to 100 participants in the New York area.