Maximize Your Pleasure

Taste

Your taste buds are busy all day detecting sweet, salty, bitter and sour flavors in your food. But they don’t quit during sex. When you exchange deep, wet kisses with your partner, your buds pick up on the taste of his lips and saliva, the latter of which can intensify arousal. “Although it’s just a theory, and there’s been little research on the subject of kissing, one school of thought is that the saliva in a man’s mouth contains trace amounts of testosterone, which he transmits to his partner, increasing her sex drive,” says Cooper. You can play with taste during sex by sucking on a lollipop before kissing for a sugary rush or spicing up oral sex with edible lube.

Smell

You love your partner’s scent—that unique, natural odor, which is most potent when he first wakes up in the morning or hasn't showered yet. Smell is known for its power of association, but there are subtler biological factors at play, too: Famous research published in the U.K. journal Proceedings of the Royal Society found that when couples dig each other’s scent, their bodies are subconsciously responding to the other’s dissimilar immune systems, which appears to signal reproductive compatibility. This could be because offspring born to couples with dissimilar immune systems may be better equipped to fend off more diseases (sexy, we know). So during sex, simply taking a whiff of your partner can boost your libido.

You can also stimulate your sniffer by inhaling other types of scents. Studies conducted by the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago found that various scents, such as lavender and pumpkin pie, revs libido in men and women. Try lighting scented candles before sex to release an arousing odor into the room, or give each other a sensual rubdown with scented oils.

MORE: The Link Between Scent and Attraction