Bio-engineering vaginas not about peach smell, company says, but making them healthier

Peach smell is just a signal that the more important things are working, company says

Sweet Peach, the company that caused outrage last week by apparently suggesting that women should bio-engineer their vaginas to smell like peaches, said this week that the peach smell is not a key part of the product but just a marker that their product is working.

The company will actually give customers the opportunity to take a range of supplements to improve their health, the company said, with the option to change their vaginas to smell like peaches being available, but just to demonstrate that the treatment is working.

That proposal, which was reported after a presentation by one of the company's investors last week, caused outrage and accusations of misogyny.

Customers will send the company a sample of their vaginal microbiome. The company will synthesise the results and be able to produce a personalised regime of supplements designed to improve customers' health and to target yeast infections and urinary tract infections.

The scent is one of those — which could be included to show that the rest of the changes are working — but not the main aim of the product, its makers claim.

And the name’s reference to peach — which has been mentioned as a possible smell alongside roses and cola — is more a reference to the use of peaches as a symbol for the vagina than to the company’s odour-plans, the company’s founder and CEO Audrey Hutchinson says.

The confusion came about because biotech entrepreneurs Austen Heinz and Gilad Gome mischaracterised the company at a recent tech conference, she said. Before that happened, this week, the company was still being kept quiet and so wasn’t supposed to be announced at all.

The mistake is likely to help the crowdfunding campaign that is set to launch in a few days, as the uproar stokes interest in the site, Heinz told Inc.com. But the furore has been bad for investors, he said, who tend to avoid such controversy — one large investor that was being finalised as the news broke ended up pulling out, he said.