you would be forgiven for thinking that
the best way to smell attractive
is to cover up your natural scent based
on the size of the market
for high-end fragrances but what if our
own smell was the key to impressing a
date
it sounds strange to say that body odour
can smell pleasant
vo is made up of gases released by
bacteria that live on our skin
digesting the chemicals that we sweat
and excrete from our bodies
but the smells that those bacteria
produce can change depending on our
health
diet age genetics and any number of
other things
body odors contain various compounds
some of those compounds are stable some
of those compounds are variable
and some of those compounds are variable
to a very fast extent
so let's first start with the staple
compounds those are genetically related
so we cannot change them during the
course of our life and the variable
compounds
they are related to nutrition and this
is kind of stable
they are also related to fitness for
instance
or for women to the menstrual cycle
um and the very variable compounds are
for instance related to our emotion
so our sweat really smells a little bit
different when we are afraid as compared
to when we are sexually aroused
our genetics play an important role in
determining the smell of our ba
meaning that everyone's smell is unique
to them we know this because
twins bo is so similar the test
participants are able to match
two t-shirts worn by twins when mixed up
with
other random t-shirts in fact
participants in this experiment
couldn't tell the difference between
twins t-shirts and two t-shirts worn by
the same person
our noses are surprisingly perceptive to
human smell
and contained in that smell is all sorts
of information about a person's diet
fertility age health and genetics so can
we use that information
to make choices about who we date
well heterosexual men find women's bio
more pleasant during the follicular
phase of their menstrual cycle when
women are at their most fertile
and least pleasant during menstruation
when women are at their least fertile
this may have been evolutionary
important
because if a woman is more attractive to
a man
at a time when she is actually fertile
then
it's a good investment of resources for
the men to approach her at exactly
this time this led scientists to ponder
can we smell attractive people to answer
that elona croy and other researchers
like
her use smelly t-shirts worn by
strangers to test participants noses
in one study participants were given a
range of t-shirts and asked to rate them
based on their bo
women found that single men's t-shirts
smelled stronger than married men's
t-shirts
which might be useful information if
you're looking for a date
similar scent-based attraction studies
have found a curious link between
bo preference and something called hla
dissimilarity
hla is a group of proteins that play a
role in coding
for some of our immune response
everyone's hla profile
is slightly different and reveals which
kind of diseases we have immunity to
it is also heritable so we pass on some
of that immunity to our children
from an evolutionary point of view it is
an advantage to have offspring with
someone who is hla
dissimilar meaning their immune system
defends them against a different set of
diseases
this means that their offspring is very
likely to be heterozygous
meaning that the offspring has a high
variability
against a large variety of petagons and
this means that it's very beneficial if
i made with someone who has a different
immune system than i have in some
studies
single people have been found to prefer
the bo of hla dissimilar individuals
these studies suggest that we might be
able to use our sense of smell to pick
out good mates however the most
comprehensive study of its kind
found no link between bo preference hla
dissimilarity
and chosen partners in 3 700 married
couples
basically while we are able to tell the
difference between good b.o
and bad b.o we probably won't end up
choosing who we marry
based on their smell
you