Why do we find some scents sexy?
Fragrances surround us all day. In the morning we soap ourselves with shampoo and shower gel, then we apply deodorant and maybe also a sprayer or two of our favorite perfumes. We move through the world in a small cloud of scent, as if our own body odor had to be fought permanently.
Most women prefer lovely smells, men tart ones. You can already see it on the drugstore shelf. Women should smell like coconut, vanilla, mango, men like sport, whatever that is. It definitely smells coarser, spicier. Why is that? And why do we perceive rumors differently?
How important smells are is noticeable at the latest when someone is wearing the same perfume and it is irritating. Or when someone on the street smells of their partner and then he or she isn't.
How important is a person's smell?
Very important, but we are not aware of that to that extent. Everyone wears an individual fragrance. I'm not talking about perfume, but about body scents. We also communicate with a kind of chemical language and give off special fragrance information. This is how we express whether we are afraid, whether we are excited, whether we want to create trust. Women also use scent to communicate when they are ovulating.
What do we smell with the body scent?
To put it simply, we can smell our genes in the case of individual body scents. Science does not know exactly how this works. The more different people's genes are, the more different is their body odor. Women prefer men with very different body odors from their own; to be precise, a 76 percent difference is optimal. In this way, evolution controls that the couple comes together with the most suitable immune system in order to produce children as healthy as possible.
Why should women smell more lovely and men rather coarse?
In terms of cultural history, the past is probably responsible for this. In the past, women were more engaged in food and gardening, while the men hunted, rode, and came back sweaty. This olfactory memory was passed on.
Til today?
Yes. What we perceive as male and female, we learn as babies, as children. Our sense of smell is conditioned. We are born largely without fragrance preferences and get to know smells through people and then associate them with women and men accordingly. Smelling actually begins in the 28th week of pregnancy as an embryo.
What smells make people attractive?
There is no odor that makes people generally attractive. That always depends on the subjective experience of the individual with fragrances. What we have stored positively, we perceive positively throughout our life.
What if women now only use tart perfumes and men's lovely ones?
One can of course re-educate our noses. If from now on all men smell flowery, lovely and women smell of tobacco, leather, and resin, at some point our descendants would judge it as normal. Today, however, a man who smells of violets, lilies of the valley, and roses would not be considered masculine.
A colleague from the USA sprayed young, slim girls with a floral scent of grapefruit and let men smell them. Afterward, these men rated older, thicker women who wore this scent as lighter and younger.
Are the smell preferences of heterosexuals and homosexuals the same?
We know that men prefer the men's armpit sweet scent. It's the same with homosexual women.
Why do we even use artificial smells?
With the fragrance we use, we make a statement to the outside world. With this, people smell something about me, which they evaluate according to their experience. In one culture, these are often similar associations. In this way, I can influence what people should think of me. You can give yourself a fragrant image.
That means that your own body odor in turn has a bad image. Why?
People used to smell very intensely and couldn't wash. Then came the perfumes, rich people could get rid of that unpleasant smell. The artificial scent suddenly became a trademark. That was something special. It also helped mask the smell of sweat. By the way, it doesn't smell bad in itself, that's how we were trained.
In Papua New Guinea, the smell of sweat is not negative, it is still used as a source of information.
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