In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
— Margaret Atwood
I will be the first to admit that I find certain women attractive.
Not that I would ever approach one of them, due to my overwhelming fear of rejection.
But like a lot of other men, I’ve sometimes wondered why Woman A is attractive to me, while Woman B is not. I mean, why wouldn’t I be attracted equally to all women? It would certainly increase my chances of being rejected, if nothing else.
One of the men curious about this question — what makes Woman A attractive — is Janek Lobmaier, the University of Bern, in Switzerland, in their Department of Social Neuroscience and Social Psychology. He and his colleagues, looked at the question of how people smell. Not, “how their noses work”… but rather, “their characteristic body odors.” The study was summarized in a Royal Society article.
Are we all being led by our noses?
Professor Lobmaier wanted to find out whether certain women smell universally more pleasing than others, or if it’s perhaps more a matter of personal taste… er, smell. So, he put more than 50 straight men to a smell test involving the body odors of 30 non-pregnant, potentially fertile, women. The women swabbed their armpits with cotton pads, on nights when their levels of luteinizing hormone were at their highest, a sign that the women were at the most fertile point in their cycles.
The straight men sniff-tested the cotton pads and rated how pleasing they found the fragrance… and perhaps surprisingly, they mostly agreed on which smells they found most attractive. (Note the word “mostly”.)
I personally would never pick a mate based on sniffing a cotton pad, but I understand where Dr. Lobmaier was going with this. He was assuming that a guy is most attracted to a woman when she is ovulating and likely to get pregnant.
This guy is a professor of social psychology? And he thinks a guy wants his girlfriend to get pregnant? Where has he been living? Like, Switzerland?
Actually, he has been living in Switzerland, which, he may not realize, has one of the lowest birthrates in the world.
I think it would have been interesting if the men had swabbed their own armpits, and the women had been made to choose. But that wasn’t part of the experiment. Probably a lucky thing for the women.
Thinking back on my own personal experiences, I fell instantly head over heels for my future wife Darlene (now my ex-wife) when she was working the refreshment counter at the Saratoga Theater. The only smell I can recall from that moment is buttered popcorn.
Our torrid romance was marked by other memorable smells. The smell of burned meatloaf, the first time she invited me for dinner. The smell of my Ford Pinto suddenly overheating while doing 65 on the freeway. The smell of her dog Bella puking in my lap as we watched The Dukes of Hazzard on Darlene’s black-and-white TV.
Why we ended up married, probably had very little to do with smells. Ditto, the reasons for our divorce — but you can never tell about these things.
There are certain smells that bring back pleasant memories of Darlene, however. Head and Shoulders shampoo, for example.
Maybe… if I had swabbed her armpits with cotton pads while she was ovulating, things would have turned out differently. Unfortunately, Dr. Lobmaier hadn’t taught us the importance of swapping armpits.
But like a famous person once said, until you walk a mile in someone’s shoes, you can’t imagine the smell.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.