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Are Our Bodies Affected by Another Person's Scent?
Everyday, men and women are concerned with smelling good, if only to appeal to the other sex and a potential mate. The sin of having terrible body odor constantly dogs us and we know that this might cost us our friends and lovers. To smell good always therefore, it is necessary to mask our body odor in perfumes and colognes. This obviously means that our body odor is important-in fact, so important that it can wreck a good relationship and perhaps our love life too.
Way back in 1997, a study was conducted on men and women to see the effect how sensitive they were to body odors. College students were asked to wear a T-shirt for 48 hours during which time they were asked to do some heavy exercise like pushups, calisthenics or jogging for at least an hour. At the end of two days, the subjects returned the T-shirts to the experimenters in tightly sealed bags. They were then asked to smell these shirts at random and rate them on relative offensiveness.
Subjects rated them as dirtier, less intelligent, less healthy or fatter and less appealing to the opposite sex, though the owners of the T-shirts were in reality stronger, more industrious and more athletic. Subjects also rated their own T-shirts as least offensive, proving that you can live with your own scent for long but not with that of others.
In yet another experiment, married couples were asked to wear their T-shirts to bed for a week. When smelled, subjects could identify those T-shirts worn by their mates, and in general, men and women found the odors of men more disgusting than that of women, and subjects tended to rate their mate's odor as less disgusting than their own. But the Japanese women subjects of this experiment considered their husband's more odorous than their own, because their marriages are arranged by the elders of their families, not giving them a chance to "sniff out" a partner for themselves.
The idea behind this is that if we sniff people out we tend to like them, because their odor is familiar to us. So, if we have strong positive feelings toward a person, his body odor can give off positive responses. This odor may be natural, or from a perfume. So, if you love a person, he or she need not use any perfumes or colognes to smell good.
However, it's not always a happy situation to smell good. For instance, if you wear perfume to an interview, women interviewers respond to this favorably, but not so male interviewers. Men interviewers believe that if you are serious about your presentation, fragrance should not be part of it, and that at an interview one should demonstrate ability and ambition, not fragrance.
So, if you are going to be interviewed by a man, rest assured he's not going to be led by the nose.