What Your Smell Says About You
The next time you're debating whether you should shower before work, consider this: People can smell your personality.
In a study published in the European Journal of Personality, researchers asked hopefully well-paid participants to sniff unwashed t-shirts worn for three straight days sweaty people with no deodorant to call their own. Hold on. There's a reason. The sniffers were then asked to guess the personalities of the shirts' owners based on their smell. Most of the time, they were able to predict the funky odor belonging to an extroverted, dominant person as well as the smell belonging to a neurotic type. In other words, both Type-A characters and nervous, anxiety-ridden people have specific, unique smells and everyone can spot it a mile away.
Previous research has found that emotions play a key role in odor production. So when you're feeling nervous, you may produce a different b.o. than when you're relaxed. But some odors are just coursing through your sweat glands, emotions be damned. Hormones, particularly testosterone, are a major factor in the way you spray. One separate study found that ovulating women (who have a particularly fine-tuned sense of smell during that fertile time of their cycle) are drawn to men with high-testosterone odors, because it denotes dominance. Stink it up boys, we are cavewomen.
Being a lady, and a lover of stinky cheese, I can easily picture what dominance smells like. But what does nervousness smell like and is there ever a time in the month when men find that pungent expression of anxiety irresistible? Shower it is.
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