Do Fertile women smell sexy?

Tuesday, 3 April, 2001, 17:59 GMT 18:59 UK
BBC News

Do Fertile women smell sexy?

Question: How does a man know if a woman is at that most fertile stage of the month and likely to get pregnant if he has sex with her?

Answer: He has a good sniff of the T-shirt she wears in bed.

It might sound a bit bizarre but this is precisely what scientists asked a group of men to do in a study designed to establish what sort of odours women gave off when they ovulated.

And the results came back strongly: a man thinks a woman smells particularly pleasant, even sexier, during the fertile period of her menstrual cycle.

Perfume ban

The researchers, from the University of Texas, Austin, US, got 17 women to participate in the T-shirt study.

The women were asked to wear one shirt for three consecutive nights during the most fertile phase of their 28-day cycle, and another garment during their least fertile period.

None of the women were allowed to use perfumes, fragrant soaps or wash powders, eat spicy foods, engage in sexual activity or use the pill.

All the shirts were then numbered and handed to a group of 52 men, who had to rate the nightwear in terms of how intense, how pleasant and how sexy they found the smell of the garments.

The results were striking, say the researchers, who publish details of their work in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Smell rating

The men found the T-shirts worn during the fertile phase of the month significantly preferable.

Given that a woman goes through immense hormonal changes during her menstrual cycle, it is probably not that surprising that her body odours change with the different phases, the team say.

The results also fit with other studies that have demonstrated some of the more subtle signals women can send out to indicate they are fertile.

It is known, for example, that a woman's skin will lighten slightly and her breasts will tend to become more symmetrical around the fertile period.

One research project even suggested that women wore more revealing clothes during this time of the month.

Why does odor help prevent incest?
Thu Aug 22, 2002 10:23 AM ET

Dislike of family members odors was part of nature's way of preventing incest, by making people less appealing to their closest relatives.

LONDON (Reuter) - Family members tend not to like the way each other smell, researchers say, speculating that the unpleasant stink of your closest relatives may be one of nature's ways of discouraging incest.

In research described on Thursday in Britain's New Scientist magazine, a team at Wayne State University in Detroit recruited 25 families with children aged between six and 15, and gave them T-shirts to sleep in and odorless soap to wash with.

They were told to keep the T-shirts in plastic bags. They were later asked to sniff two T-shirts, one worn by a family member and another worn by a stranger.

The researchers first tested whether family members could recognize each other.

They found that mothers and fathers could usually tell when they were smelling their pre-adolescent children, with mothers being slightly better at it than dads, but they could not say which child was which.

Children younger than nine -- with the notable exception of sons who had been breastfed -- generally could not recognize their mothers, while older children could. All the children recognized their fathers.

Interestingly, whether or not they recognized which T-shirt belonged to a family member, volunteers usually said they far preferred the smell of the stranger's shirt.

Mothers particularly did not like the smell of their children, and children had a strong aversion to the smell of their fathers. Children of the same sex were not offended by each other's smell, but children of opposite sex were.

Researcher Tiffany Czilli said that she believed the dislike of each other's odors was part of nature's way of preventing incest, by making people less appealing to their closest relatives.

Other family issues could be at work too: the particular aversion that children have to the smell of dad could also be a sign of children trying to grow up and be independent.

But Dustin Penn of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City warned that asking people about their preferences could be unreliable.

"Just because people say they 'prefer' something doesn't mean they'll act in a preferential way," he said.

Source: http://story.news.yahoo.com