Women's Natural Scent More Seductive Than Perfume

Women looking for that special someone might want to think twice before spritzing Chanel No. 5. A new study suggests that natural scent of a woman can be all you need.

Recent research shows that levels of testosterone of a man, which are related to sexual interest, are significantly higher when they smell the shirt of a woman is ovulating. These results could lead to the development of new fragrances that mimic this effect, and answer basic questions about human biology.

"This is an issue that has been hotly debated: ovulation or hidden in human females," said Jon Maner, co-author of recent work in the journal Psychological Science. "In many other species, there are obvious indicators, but has long been assumed that human females do not emit these signals."
In the past 10 years, however, psychologists have found that ovulating women may behave differently, with a tendency to be more flirtatious, have sexual fantasies more often, and prefer the hyper-masculine men.

In surveys, men report being more attracted to women ovulate. The new study builds on this research by measuring the response of men to a specific chemical signal.

The researchers performed two different experiments, but related. In the first scenario, the scientists gave four ugly women, white shirts. The women wore shirts more than three days when they went to sleep. The researchers gathered the shirt in a plastic bag, divided up according to whether the woman was ovulating, and froze them.

In the second experiment, the scientists added an additional variable: cool t-shirts that had not been used by anyone.

T-shirts in hand, scientists asked dozens of men to stick their noses into the bags. As the men sniffed the shirts, scientists sampled saliva from the participants, was used to measure testosterone.

Men's shirts smelling women ovulate in the first experiment had, in the middle levels, testosterone were 37 percent higher than men's shirts that smelled of women do not ovulate.

For the second experiment, the testosterone levels of men who smelled the shirts of ovulating women were, on average, 15 percent more than men who sniffed the two other samples of the shirt.

Other studies have linked higher levels of testosterone with an increase in sexual arousal, Maner said. Whether 37 percent or 15 percent difference in testosterone is sufficient to affect the behavior of a man is unknown.

Another unknown is whether a man could detect a woman ovulates in a real world situation, such as a crowded bar. The two experiments were conducted under controlled laboratory conditions. But scientists say the experiments may have a real life for potential love connections.

"The men were smelling shirts, not real women," Maner said. "We hope that the smell coming from a woman will be stronger than a shirt that was frozen."

Exactly how far the scent of a woman diffuses out remains to be seen. Scientists have not identified the specific chemical odors that stimulate increases in testosterone levels in men.

It is possible that men are directly detect higher levels of estrogen during ovulation, "said Jim Roney, a scientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Equally possible is that men are sensitive to other chemicals that rise and fall depending on the amount of estrogen. Scientists do not know.