Jesse Bering

How does one broach such an indelicate topic as body odor except perhaps to borrow from the immortal words of the Roman playwright, Terence, who famously said that, “nothing human is alien to me.” True, Terence probably wasn’t referring to flatulence, armpit secretions, halitosis, foot odor, and the many and unspeakably loathsome scents associated with various fungal infections in the body’s hinterlands when he wrote this. Still, his axiom covers a lot of territory on the human condition, including our somewhat smelly natures. And as mature science-minded adults, perhaps we shouldn’t be so shy about our stenches, anyway, since it turns out that our social behaviors—particularly human sexual instincts—are driven by our perceptions of each other’s aromas more than we tend to realize.

Compared to the brains of other mammals, the primate olfactory cortex (the brain region associated with processing smells) has decreased in size and relative importance over the course of evolution, being outranked in functional priority by the visual system. But we do have noses for a reason. In fact, for many reasons, a sizeable proportion of which involves gathering useful information from the environment in the form of “chemosignals,” more commonly known as pheromones. As recent findings tell us, other people’s apocrine glands—that is to say, their armpits—are routinely piping out a lot of important social information. These armpit odor molecules are sucked up into our sinuses, processed by our brains, and translated into some rather interesting psychological and behavioral reactions.

Men’s body odors tend to be more pungent than women’s, and this peculiarly strong punch can communicate a lot of information about the individual’s genetic quality. Women, in turn, have an almost preternatural olfactory sense, one that appears designed for unconsciously sniffing out the mate value of prospective reproductive partners. This sex difference is probably owed to the fact that women evolved to be more discerning in their choice of sexual partners given the relative risk imbalance of casual intercourse between men and women. Historically, a man’s thirty or so seconds of physiological bliss often amounted to nine months of dangerous physiological stress on the woman’s body, not to mention a lengthy forfeiting of other reproductive opportunities. Fortunately, nature gave women a set of helpful olfactory tools to hound out whose seed was “worthy” (which means highest in adaptive value) of their uterine investment.

For example, women tend to find the smell of high-testosterone males more attractive when they’re in the most fertile phase of their menstrual cycles. Also, in controlled tests where female judges have no idea what the man looks like, women rate the body odors of attractive men as being “sexier” than those of men who aren’t as fortunate in the looks department. Think of those old Coke versus Pepsi taste test commercials and you get the idea, except here married women can’t easily alter their shopping habits to suit their preferences. (Note that I didn’t say “can’t”—just can’t easily.) So, in honor of your overworked and underappreciated nose, which has certainly experienced its share of disagreeable people in its years of service to you, what follows is just a sample of some ripe data appearing in the study of body odor perception.

To begin with, however, it’s worth pointing out there’s really no such thing as an intrinsically “bad smell.” Rather, there are only smells; and how we perceive them is largely an artifact of our particularly human evolutionary heritage. To say that rotting flesh smells disgusting is similar to saying that the sunset looks beautiful—there’s no “beautiful-ness” quality intrinsic to the sunset just as there’s no “disgusting-ness” intrinsic to rotting flesh. Rather, rotting flesh and sunsets are only perceived this way by the human mind; as “phenomenological” qualities, adjectives such as “beautiful” and “disgusting” merely describe how we subjectively experience the natural world. I can assure you that whatever particular scents you find repulsive, my dog, Gulliver, would likely perceive as irresistibly appealing. And I mean rotting flesh and just about anything else you can think of, with the exception perhaps of skunk odor and his own feces, for which I can only hope you’d share a mutual disdain.

But back to human armpits. One of the most important target chemicals believed to play a role in modulating people’s attraction toward others is called androstadienone, a compound found in axillary secretions. When women are exposed to this “chemosignal,” it activates regions of their brains associated with attention, social cognition, emotional processing and sexual behavior. The effects of androstadienone on female arousal were clearly documented in a 2008 article in the journal Hormones and Behavior. Researcher Tamsin Saxton from the University of Liverpool and her colleagues organized a series of speed-dating events in which—as typically happens with these things—women were stationed at numbered tables and male suitors moved from table to table at regular three-minute intervals. As an “ecologically valid” study, behavior between the men and women was allowed to occur naturally. That is to say, there were no experimental scripts and, indeed, although women were aware that they were participating in a study, all participants were rightly under the impression that this was an actual opportunity to meet potential partners.

The catch was that prior to their interactions with the men, the researchers had randomly assigned the women to one of three experimental conditions in which they were asked to dab a saturated cotton pad in that little crevice between their nose and their lips. Without the participants knowing which condition they’d been assigned to, the pad had either just been dipped in water alone, in clove oil (one percent clove oil in propylene glycol), or in a concentration of androstadienone mixed with the clove oil solution to mask the scent. The gist of the results was that the women who’d been randomly assigned to the androstadienone condition found the men significantly more attractive than did those in the water and clove oil only conditions, who didn’t differ from each other.

One very obvious lesson to learn from this research is that although physical attractiveness can be “operationalized” as a construct, such as in evolutionary psychologists’ findings that people who have symmetrical faces and who have prototypically sized features are universally regarded as physically attractive, there are also important olfactory caveats to consider. Namely, the smells attending our perception of someone else—the “ambient odors” that are paired in our minds with that person—can modulate our feelings of attraction toward them. Once, I was introduced to a very good-looking person who, with his symmetrical features and almost computer-generated prototypical face, from several feet away admittedly made my heart patter. But as I neared him I inhaled a breath of air so foul that it could only be described as coming from the intestinal tract of a sick goat. Needless to say, in spite of his handsome appearance my sexual alchemy with this person has been rather soured as a consequence. (There is some evidence that the same hypothalamic regions activated by androstadienone in the brains of heterosexual women are also activated by these pheromones in homosexual mens’ brains). So although physical attractiveness may be reduced to very specific geo-facial algorithms reflecting genetic value, we live in an odorous world where pretty faces aren’t always paired with pretty smells, and a proper science of attraction must account for these dynamic factors.

In fact, University of Oxford psychologist M. Luisa Demattè and her colleagues have started to do precisely this. In a 2007 article published in the journal Chemical Senses, Demattè and coauthors Robert Österbauer and Charles Spence point out that, “despite the fact that virtually all humans use some sort of fragranced products on their bodies, there are surprisingly few studies that have directly investigated the question of whether the presence of an odor can cross-modally influence a person’s judgment of another person’s physical attractiveness when assessed visually.”