The very word "perfume" has feminine overtones to many male ears. Men can be sold "deodorant" and possibly "aftershave," but the idea of all those dinky little bottles is too much for the sensitive male ego. Yet no industry can afford to neglect half its potential market, and perfume-makers are ever keen to crack the shell of male reticence. Now they may have found how to do so.
Craig Roberts of the University of Liverpool in England and his colleagues -- working with a team from Unilever's research laboratory -- have been investigating the problem. They knew that appropriate scents can improve the mood of those who wear them. What they discovered, though, as they will describe in a forthcoming edition of the International Journal of Cosmetic Science, is that when a man changes his natural body odor it can alter his self-confidence to such an extent that it also changes how attractive women find him.
Half of Roberts' volunteers were given an aerosol spray containing a commercial formulation of fragrance and antimicrobial agents. The other half were given a spray identical in appearance but lacking active ingredients. The study was arranged so that the researchers did not know who had received the scents and who got the dummies. Each participant obviously knew what he was spraying on himself, as he could smell it. But because no one was told the purpose of the experiment, those who got the dummies did not realize they were being matched against people with a properly smelly aerosol.
Over the course of several days, Roberts' team conducted a battery of psychological tests on both groups of volunteers. They found that those who had been given the commercial fragrances showed an increase in self-confidence. Not that surprising, perhaps. What was surprising was that their self-confidence improved to such an extent that women who could watch them but not smell them noticed. The women in question were shown short, silent videos of the volunteers. They deemed the men wearing the deodorant more attractive. They were, however, unable to distinguish between the groups when shown only still photographs of the men, suggesting it was the men's movement and bearing, rather than their physical appearance, that was making the difference.
For Unilever and other manufacturers of men's scent, this is an important discovery. The firm's marketing of its main product in this area, a deodorant called Lynx, plays up the so-called "Lynx Effect," which is supposed to make men irresistibly attractive to women.
The nose knows
Nor is this the only example of science illuminating the true role of perfumes. How they work to make people attractive is, as this example shows, not as obvious as it might seem.
There are three broad theories of perfume use. One is that people employ it to mask body odors that they perceive as bad. The second is that some perfumes contain chemicals that mimic human pheromones -- elusive, mysterious (and possibly mythical) substances believed by some to play a role in mating. The third is that people use it to heighten or fortify natural scents, and thus advertise sexual attractiveness or availability.
All three theories could be true. In particular, the role of perfume as an olfactory disguise is obvious. As to pheromones, whether humans have these is questionable. A pheromone is a chemical that elicits a specific behavioral response at a distance. Some insects, for example, can release sex pheromones that will attract a mate from miles away. The most likely human candidate is a substance called androstadienone. This is a derivative of testosterone that is found in men's sweat and is known, from brain-scanning studies, to promote activity in parts of women's brains. That this results in changes in behavior has not, however, been clearly demonstrated.
The most interesting area, though, is the interaction between perfumes and natural scents that carry messages but do not have the specific properties of pheromones. Odors coordinate a wide range of human behavior. Mothers can recognize their children by smell. Children can recognize each other. Relatives can be distinguished from non-relatives, even to the extent of understanding who is genetically different enough from the smeller to be a good choice of mate. The sexes themselves smell different, too, and women can glean information about a man's social status from his smell alone.
