IS it the olfactory equivalent of a little red dress?

Eau Flirt, an electric-green elixir that sells for $12 to $98, is billed by its manufacturer, the company Harvey Prince, as “the world’s first perfume clinically proven to make men flirt with women.”

Inspired by an independent study conducted by the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago that found that men became sexually aroused when sniffing a combination of pumpkin pie and lavender, Eau Flirt is but one player in a longstanding category of fragrances marketed specifically as romantic attractants. Some are all natural; others say they contain pheromones. All of them claim to make the wearer irresistible.

Are we being doused with science or marketing hype? Perhaps both.

“There’s really nothing that you can spray on and the opposite sex will fall for you,” said Dr. Johan Lundstrom, an assistant member of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. “It’s completely a placebo effect.”

That doesn’t mean fragrances can’t be bewitching. At Barneys New York last week, Dr. Leslie B. Vosshall, a professor and head of the laboratory of neurogenetics and behavior at Rockefeller University, introduced a reporter to an array of provocative perfumes to underscore that smell can “put us in the mood like no other sense.”