Women Pick Up Body Odour Better
Women may be better at sniffing out biologically relevant information from underarm sweat, a US study suggests. Researchers found it was difficult to mask underarm odour when a woman was doing the smelling. But quite easy to do so when it was a man. They speculate that a woman's highly attuned smell radar might help her select a mate. The study, by Philadelphia's Monell Center, appears in Flavour and Fragrance Journal. In the study, women and men rated the strength of underarm odours, both alone and in conjunction with various fragrances. The fragrances were selected to test their ability to block underarm odour through a method known as olfactory cross-adaptation. This occurs when the nose adapts to one odour, and then also becomes less sensitive to a second odour. Sniffed alone, the underarm odours smelled equally strong to men and women.