By Fran Molloy
If you really want to come up smelling like a rose—or any other element in nature—essential oils are a much better bet than commercial perfume, but on certain occasions you might be wise to forego fragrance entirely. Let’s say you’re looking for your soulmate. Recent studies at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia showed that artificial fragrance actually hides a woman’s true scent from her ideal genetic partner.
Women, on the other hand, are still likely to recognize a potential mate’s natural scent through any aftershave or other fragrance a man might slap on before a night on the prowl.
Researchers believe that women make use of their noses in social situations far more than men, who rely primarily on visual cues. “We found that using different fragrance materials to reduce the impact of a man’s body odor will work on the noses of other men—but won’t work on the noses of women,” says Dr. Charles Wysocki, a behavioral neuroscientist at Monell. So while a woman can disguise her natural scent (however ripe) from men, a man can’t quite pull it off.
“A woman’s nose seems to be much more tuned-in to body odors,” Wysocki explains. “We think that from an evolutionary perspective, that’s because women need to gain as much information as possible about potential mates, because they have a very limited number of times that they can have successful pregnancies.”
In fact, subjects asked to select a prospective date from the smell of a T-shirt the person had worn usually preferred the scent of a person whose immune system was genetically quite different from their own, Wysocki says, presumably giving their offspring optimal protection.
But women’s keen sense of smell can take a nosedive when they are in love. Wysocki’s colleagues found that women’s ability to identify the body odor of a friend of the opposite sex declined in direct correlation to their degree of affection for their boyfriend. The researchers concluded that romantic love deflects a woman’s attention away from potential new partners.
Our personal odor is as unique as our DNA. In fact, our “odor print” is determined partly by a group of genes on the sixth chromosome related to immune function, which are known as the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). But while our genetically-founded odor print remains unchanged through our lifetime, our scent has other layers of complexity and people emit different odors as they age.
Anyone who has spent time around active teenage boys will agree that hormonal changes play a big part in the way we smell. “Diet also influences the way we smell, so individuals eating a lot of garlic will have a body odor that smells of garlic,” says Wysocki. Vegetarians smell different to meat-eaters, and eating dairy products also affects your body’s odor. Illness often alters a person’s body odor, he adds, so much so that some physicians in previous centuries were trained to use their nose to diagnose individuals.
Emotional experiences also tinge our body odors in the short term, with some research showing that subjects who have watched movie clips that made them fearful or anxious had a change in their body odor that others recognized.
While fear can be contagious, there haven’t yet been any studies on whether smelling someone who is anxious or fearful will trigger the same response in a subject. There’s no doubt that you can smell fear, though. You can even buy the smell of fear. Biotech manufacturer Sigma Pseudo sells vials of Distressed Body Scent, Trauma and Fear Formulation and Corpse Scent for around $70 a pop, used in training dogs to locate victims of natural disaster or violent crime.
But can you smell love? Wysocki says that while there are no studies to back it up, he believes that the hormone-driven emotional experience of love is likely to have an impact on someone’s body odor.
“Given what is known about changes in body odor, if an individual encounters their loved one, I suspect that their body odor might change,” he says. “Whether this goes part-way to explaining the chemistry behind physical attraction, we don’t know, but it may be going on at the subconscious level.”
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