Pherlure - is it Fake?
Is it Real? Review the Information and Decide for Yourself.
Note: This site is NOT affilated with the company which produces Pherlure cologne.

Pherlure cologne supposedly has the active ingredient di-dehydroepiandrosterone. But does this chemical really exist?

We tried to find di-dehydroepiandrosterone Medline, but it wasn't there!
Medline indexes every medical and biological journal. So it contains every article and every study published in the last 30 years on any biological or medical topic. What this means is that every chemical that has been the mentioned in any published study is found in Medline.

But not Pherlure's di-dehydroepiandrosterone. This link goes to a Medline search for di-dehydroepiandrosterone, and shows the result:

Medline Search: "The following term was not found: di-dehydroepiandrosterone"

(look in the pink box under the search term - the results list is for dehydroepiandrosterone, or DHEA, a common non-pheromone).

Since it's not in Medline, di-dehydroepiandrosterone has never been mentioned in any published article or study. Pherlure claims they have a study showing that their product works, but we can no see that no such study was ever published. So is this a real chemical?

Pherlure's di-dehydroepiandrosterone isn't in ChemIDplus Advanced either
 ChemIDplus Advanced, is a database of over 380,000 chemicals. So any biologically active chemical should be there. But not pherlure's di-dehydroepiandrosterone.

There isn't an easy way to link to ChemIDplus Advanced for a search, but you can search it yourself by clicking this link: ChemIDplus Advanced Search
The result you'll get is:

Your search for chemical name "DI-DEHYDROEPIANDROSTERONE" did not retrieve any exact matches

So far we've found that there's no reference to Pherlure's di-dehydroepiandrosterone in published material or chemical databases.

Was there really a study? What kind of sites is the di-dehydroepiandrosterone study cited by Pherlure found in?

We can't find any evidence that di-dehydroepiandrosterone is a known chemical, or that any study was ever published, but did the study happen at all? According to Pherlure, a University study took place at University of Chicago (well, that's what they say now. They used to say it took place at University of Illinois at Chicago, a public institution that has no connection to the private University of Chicago).
As we will see, there's no good evidence to back this up. So was there any study at all?

A deleted student web page is the only university site to list the di-dehydroepiandrosterone study
The only place the unpublished di-dehydroepiandrosterone study could be found on a university website was in a Google cache of a University of Illinois at Chicago student website page. This cache has now expired, but here is a copy of it:
Google cache of a student web page

This student page, now deleted, was on a University of Illinois at Chicago web server. But it says that the study was done at University of Chicago. University of Chicago is a private University that has no connection with Universtiy of Illinois at Chicago - a public state school that just happens to be in the same city.

And this is the only place any reference to this study is found on any University web page. Do you believe a study really happened based on a deleted student web page? But how about the other sites that mention it?

Pherlure links to ihealthjournal.com. What kind of site is this?
 Pherlure links to a site called ihealthjournal.com to try to prove that the di-dehydroepiandrosterone study is real. But ihealthjournal.com is a strange kind of site: a site which only has pages about the di-dehydroepiandrosterone study.

Using Google, we can check to see what pages are in a site. In the case of ihealthjournal.com, the only pages were articles about di-dehydroepiandrosterone:
Here's the ihealthjournal.com Google pages listing from 5/11/2006.
There are 5 pages, of which 2 are articles on di-dehydroepiandrosterone, 1 is the main page 1 is a navigation page and 1 is a terms of use page. There were no other pages on the site.

They have added a few more pages in an attempt to look legitimate, but there's still nothing much there: Google pages listing for ihealthjournal.com

Note that this site currently claims the study happened at University of Illinois at Chicago, which is also what Pherlure says on their site.

ihealthjournal.com and pherlure.com suddenly changed their minds about where the 'study' was done
 When this site was first created, it claimed that the study which "proved" Pherlure's so-called "active ingredient" worked had taken place at University of Illinois at Chicago.

Click on this link to display an archived copy of Pherlure's site (via Archive.org), from April 21, 2005.

As you can see, it says:

A recent study conducted at The University of Illinois - Chicago reports that the "Novel human pheromone formulation (Di-Dehydroepiandrosterone) increases sexual attractiveness."
At that time, ihealthjournal.com also claimed that the study was performed at University of Illinois at Chicago.

Here's the archive.org link

But apparently someone at University of Illinois at Chicago got angry that Pherlure was making these false claims, so they told them to stop. And sure enough, Pherlure changed BOTH sites so that they now both say the study happened at University of Chicago (which, as we mentioned before is a totally different school).

here's the link to the current version of the ihealthjournal page, showing University of Chicago.

wondersinscience.com is the other site listing the di-dehydroepiandrosterone study
and it's strange too.
 wondersinscience.com is another site that used to contain a page about the di-dehydroepiandrosterone study. This site is now gone, but it was odd too. It contained only 3 pages, as can be seen in this cached version of the wondersinscience.com Google pages listing from 5/11/2006.

More oddness: It claimed the di-dehydroepiandrosterone article was archived on Monday, February 07, 2005.

However if we looked at the domain name record for wondersinscience.com, that name was registered on Feb. 10, 2005 -- three days AFTER the date when the article was supposed to have been archived.

registration information for wondersinscience.com
Interestingly, this is the SAME DAY that ihealthjournal.com was registered -- Feb. 10, 2005.
registration information for ihealthjournal.com

What do you think about Pherlure now?

What's going on here? We have a chemical which Pherlure claims is their active ingredient, but which we can't find any reference to in any published paper or database. We have a study which Pherlure claims validates their product, but it has no authors listed (and authors are always listed for any study), it was never published, and we can find it only on a deleted university page and on sites which seem to have no other real pages other than the articles about the study. And the sites can't even agree on whether the study took place at one university or another completely different one.

So what's going on? Decide for yourself whether to believe, in spite of the evidence, that Pherlure is a real product with a real ingredient and a real study that shows it works. Or believe the evidence and realize that Pherlure is none of those.

Note: Since this site was created, several pages have been added to ihealthjournal.com. These are the first pages other than the di-dehydroepiandrosterone articles to be added to these sites since they were created over a year before we published this site. The information we are presenting here was true when we first wrote it, and we have made no changes to the cached pages we are displaying.

We make no claims about what is true or false: we only present the facts, as verified by Medline and Google. Your decision about what is going on here is entirely up to you.

Does Pherlure Work?

Do you still want to know if Pherlure really works? Read the above again. We aren't saying it doesn't work. But if it is effective at all, we suspect the placebo effect would be responsible.

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di-dehydroepiandrosterone information