It’s not something you really sit around talking about, but the smell of your vagina actually tells you a lot about your health.

Every woman is different so there is naturally a fluctuation in smell, impacted in part by your diet, your hygiene and bathroom habits and what underwear you wear.

What most people don’t know is every vagina has a baseline smell, and also secretes pheromones that are perfectly normal and meant to trigger sexual interest.

There should be a healthy musky scent to it – sort of like when you work out in the gym and build up a sweat – that’s your ‘signature’ smell, according to hormone expert Alisa Vitti.

What you shouldn’t smell

Mary Jane Minkin M.D, clinical professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences at Yale University School of Medicine, says it’s hard to describe what your vagina should smell like, but very easy to know when something is wrong.

She said: “The vagina shouldn’t smell like rotten fish or anything rotting…The odor folks [describe]is from bacterial vaginosis, which is really an imbalance of good guy and bad guy bacteria (the bad guys are the anaerobic bacteria which tend to be overgrowing, and anaerobes classically produce a foul or rotting type odor).”

Remember your vagina will smell differently when you’re on your period and after sex. It’s also important to remember that your vagina is self cleaning so naturally produces discharge to eject germs.

If discharge changes in colour it’s also a way to know something is up. You want white with a little yellow, if this changes to grey or brighter yellow or green you need to get it checked. If it becomes itchy you also need to go to the doctor.

Woman tries to improve love life with a perfume using her own vaginal fluid

Try as people might, no one has ever come close to creating a truly successful love potion.

But that hasn’t stopped others in the pursuit of bottling liquid attraction, because, metaphorically speaking, love may very well be in the air.

Specifically, in the secretions our pheromones give off.

The science behind this has led to some strange and unpalatable ingredients in perfumes.

Think castoreum (an emission from the genital scent sacs of the castor beaver), ambergris (a vomit by-product from the stomach of a diseased sperm whale) and musk from the gland of a male musk deer.

Yet the key ingredient to attracting a mate may have been right in front of us all along, ladies.

Allison Ramirez decided to conduct an experiment into seeking love herself – using a perfume made from her own vaginal fluid to test out on dates.

“I wore perfume made from my vagina to see if it would get me better dates.”

This was quite literally the title, gist, and nub of what she said.

At a loose end and looking for love herself, Los Angeles-based writer and artist Allison decided to give this unusual method a whirl.

As her research revealed, using vaginal fluid has long been a ‘secret weapon’ for women.

According to The Joy of Sex, women would simply forego perfume altogether and dab this fluid onto their pulse points.

Despite this reassuring knowledge, Allison decided to plump for a more sophisticated method and instead consulted with the Institute for Art and Olfaction.

There, however, she was told by founder and director Saskia Wilson-Brown that bodily fluids can’t be used in a formula, on account of them not being stable enough.

But that didn’t mean synthetic simulations of bodily fluids couldn’t be used in conjunction with her own.

In the end, Allison plumped for a “Christmassy” scent comprised of cedar, rose, and a synthetic imitation civet cat musk.

It was the musk she ended up using for her experiment, using a long cotton wool bud to extract the excretions from her vagina before dipping it into the perfume and dabbing it on her pulse points.

Allison tried out this combination on three occasions.

The first was on a double-date, which satisfyingly concluded with a kissing session a photo booth and her date even remarking on her scent.

The second outing was a trip to a petrol station and then McDonald’s, where she got an eager and enthusiastic reception from the cashier.

On the final one, a few days later, Allison applied the scent for a breakfast date – and has since made arrangements to see him again.