Monday, August 18, 2008
Forget fatal attraction, smell is the most important characteristic for a woman choosing a romantic partner, says Rachel Herz, an expert on the psychology of smell and author of The Scent
of Desire: Discovering our Enigmatic Sense of Smell.
Since at least the time of the Egyptians, we have been adorning ourselves with scent for the purpose of attraction. Men and women differ in terms of how much of a role scent plays in their sexual attraction towards one another.
For heterosexual women, it turns out to be the number-one physical factor, as well as the most important social factor, aside from pleasantness. And this isn't about avoiding a man who smells 'bad', but rather about being especially attracted to a man who smells 'good'.
The specific fragrances a woman will be most attracted to have to do with her own personal and cultural history with the scent and its constituents — so unfortunately, there is no magic-bullet formula for creating the next super hit men's cologne!
In surveys men ranked how a woman smells as second in importance to how she looks and more important than how her voice sounds or how her skin feels.
Body chemistry plays a large role in terms of whom we are sexually attracted to and our noses speak loudly to our souls. All of us, and women in particular, end up relying quite deeply on our noses for some of the most fundamental decisions in our lives; in particular, who we choose to have children with.
The sense of a lover being 'right' or 'wrong' for you may feel like intuition, but it is real — and your nose knows it. There is something very important and biologically sound going on when a woman finds a man's smell delicious or distasteful.
Women are also very attracted by artificial fragrance and a man can mask his natural body odour with fragrance and lure biologically compatible women to him that way.
A woman's sense of smell is better than a man's, but only during those few days within a woman's monthly cycle when conception is possible. It's no accident that a woman's greatest nasal acuity coincides with the fleeting days of maximum fertility — the time when it is most important for her to sense out the best biological mate.
