The Axe Effect

Dear Senserely Yours,

I was watching Got to Believe's Best Ending Ever when suddenly it was time for a commercial break. The Axe commercial played where, like all of their previous commercials, the girls chase the dude who sprayed himself with Axe. I just wanted to ask if things like a person's smell can have an effect on his or her attractiveness. Can smell affect how we see a person?

Ilong Ranger

Axe Commercial: Even Angels Will Fall

Dear Ilong Ranger,

Usually, when we think about a person's attractiveness, the first thing that comes to mind is how he or she looks. Physical attributes play a key role on how we rate a person's attractiveness. The power of olfaction has been given much less importance when compared to vision and hearing. Most people believe that they rely very little on their sense of smell and more on their sense of sight when assessing potential mates (Grammer, Fink, & Neave, 2004). However, a number of studies have shown that olfaction has a contribution in mate choice. Olfaction, whether conscious or unconscious, can play a significant role in human reproductive biology. Olfactory receptors send projections to the neocortex for conscious processing but in addition to this it also sends projections to the limbic system for emotional processing. This makes olfactory signals induce emotional responses even if the olfactory stimulus is not perceived consciously (Grammer, Fink, & Neave, 2004).

Returning to olfaction and attractiveness, a classic study done by Thornhill and Gangestad (1999) demonstrated that attractiveness judgments done by females are at least in part guided by olfaction information. They found that the attractiveness of male body odor has a positive correlation with facial attractiveness and negatively with fluctuating asymmetry. Other past studies that were based on questionnaires asked female participants to rate the relative importance of the different senses used within mate choice. The first study found that females rate olfactory cues as more important than all the other sensory cues when choosing a potential mate (Herz & Cahill, 1997 as cited in Havlicek et al., 2008). The second study done by Herz and Inzlicht (2002 as cited in Havlicek et al., 2008), which allowed participants to select characteristics related to social and personality factors of a potential partner in addition to physical factors, found that men and women rated the pleasantness of the potential lover as most important but when it comes to physical cues, body odor was the most important for women while men placed more importance on visual appearance. 

It is important to note that most of the studies done comparing the importance of visual and olfactory cues of attractiveness has relied mostly on retrospective self-report methods that ask respondents to recall the importance of attractiveness cues (Foster, 2008). Foster (2008) studied the importance of sight and smell by exposing participants to actual stimuli unlike prior studies that used survey measures. He found that sight is more important than smell when women judge men's attractiveness given that they are tested under conditions that approximate how attractiveness perceptions are made in the natural environment. In addition, he also found that women's fertility may also play a role in the extent to which women use olfactory information when making judgments on attractiveness. Smell may influence the attractiveness judgments of fertile women more than infertile women. Foster (2008) concluded that olfactory cues are important determinants of general attractiveness, at least in fertile women, but visual cues are significantly better predictors of attractiveness judgments.

Studies like Foster's add to the growing body of literature concerning how humans judge attractiveness. Indeed, olfaction plays a role on how we judge the attractiveness of other people. So when you want to attract someone, make sure you just don't look good, but also make sure you smell good.

Senserely yours,

Holly

References

Foster, J. D. (2008). Beauty is mostly in the eye of the beholder: Olfactory versus visual cues of attractiveness. Journal Of Social Psychology, 148(6), 765-774. Retrieved from http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=2&sid=64f51c79-9408-4871-a51c-a70aca1a15e0%40sessionmgr4005&hid=4112

Grammer, K., Fink, B., & Neave, N. (2005). Human pheromones and sexual attraction. European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Reproductive Biology, 118(2), 135-142. doi:10.1016/j.ejogrb.2004.08.010

Havlicek, J., Saxton, T.K., Roberts, C., Jozifkova, E., Lhota, S., Valentova, J., & Flegr, J. (2008). He sees, she smells? Male and female reports of sensory reliance in mate choice and non-mate choice contexts. Personality and Individual Differences, 45(6), 565-570. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2008.06.019

Thornhill, R. & Gangestad, S.W. (1999). The scent of symmetry: A human sex pheromone that signals fitness? Evolution and Human Behavior, 20(3), 175-201. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1090-5138(99)00005-7

Photo credits:

http://modernmancollection.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Woman-Smelling-Man.jpg

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01416/woman_man_1416378c.jpg