Christopher Plata doesn’t have time or patience for bad dates anymore. The 30 year-old nursing student has been trying for years to meet Mr. Right—first on Grindr and Compatible Partners (eHarmony’s queer subsidiary), and more recently on Bumble—and has yet to find someone with whom he shares a real connection. “I’ve really been through the wringer,” he says. So in December, while he was attending Houston’s Day For Night music festival, he stopped by a booth hawking cheek swabs, and handed over a few thousand cheek cells in the name of love.

The booth belonged to Pheramor, a Houston-based online dating startup that claims to use your DNA as the secret sauce in its matchmaking formulation. The company launched today in its home metropolis, with plans to soon expand to other US cities. Its app, which is available for iOS and Android, is a sort of 23andMe meets Tinder meets monogamists.

Of course, sexual chemistry isn’t just about deoxyribonucleic acid. And so in addition to the 11 “attraction genes” Pheramor uses to suss out biological compatibility, the company also encourages users to connect its app with all their social media profiles, to be data-mined for personality traits and mutual interests.

It works like this: For $19.99 (plus a $10 monthly membership fee), Pheramor will ship you a kit to swab your cheeks, which you then send back for sequencing. The company will combine that information with personality traits and interests gleaned from your profile to populate your app with a carousel of genetically and socially optimized potential mates in your area. To discourage mindless swiping, each match shows up as a blurred photo with a score of your compatibility, between 0 and 100.

For some 40 million Americans like Plata, who have yet to find lasting love online, it’s a tantalizing prospect. But the science behind genetic attraction is shaky ground to build a relationship on, let alone a commercial enterprise. Sure, it might sound more solid than all the mushy behavioral psychology smoke and mirrors you get from most dating apps. It’s biology, after all! But experts say that’s just a nice hook—to satisfy a cultural desire for objectivity, even in our romantic pursuits. Love, even in 2018, can’t be reduced to your genes.

Attraction is a complicated bit of calculus. You’ve got your socioeconomic factors plus race and culture and politics and religion multiplied by what sorts of relationships you had with your parents and siblings growing up. But is there a part of the equation that is purely biological?

Pheramor—and some biologists stretching back two decades—say yes. According to them, it all comes down to pheromones. On its website, the company explains that people are more likely to be attracted to one another the more different their DNA is. “The way species can ‘sense’ how different the DNA is in a potential mate is through smelling their pheromones,” states the site’s science section.

That is a lovely story. “But the reality is that there’s no scientific evidence for something called a pheromone,” says Richard Doty, who studies smell and taste at the University of Pennsylvania. Bacteria is the single biggest determinant of body odor, he notes, and preferences for smells are to a large degree learned, subject to cultural differences.“The notion that there are these magical genes that are somehow associated with smells that permeate the environment and dictate our attraction to people is total nonsense. If human pheromones actually elicited the kinds of behaviors we see in other mammals the subways of New York City would be in a constant state of mayhem with people hopping all over each other.”