Love Stinks

What does smell have to do with love? Everything! For starters, it tells us that the way to a man's heart isn't through his stomach, it's through his nose.

by Steve Carter, Ph.D.

The sense of smell is one of our earliest evolved traits. Conceptually, you can think of smell as being one step up the ladder from pain. Like our sense of pain, our sense of smell evolved to help us avoid danger, only from a slightly greater distance (i.e., if pain tells you that fire hurts, smell tells you that something is on fire!) Although humans have a far less sensitive sense of smell than most other mammals, few changes have occurred in the olfactory sense in the past 500 million years. So, most “smells” are processed at powerful and unconscious level. When your brain receives a message from your nose, it takes it very, very seriously.

One of the ways that smell powerfully affects your life that you may not be really aware of is through your sense of taste. Now, most everyone has experienced a dulling of their sense of taste when they are suffering from nasal congestion. When you have a cold, food just doesn’t taste that good. However, you may be surprised to learn that the human tongue can only distinguish among seven to eight distinct types of taste. Seriously. Your sense of smell interacts with your tongue’s sense of taste to create what you perceive of as the “flavors” of food and drink.

Don’t believe me? Try this experiment at home with a friend: Peel and cut-up a red apple and a white potato into ½ inch cubes and place the pieces in separate bowls. Now make your friend close their eyes, pinch their nose shut, and start feeding them cubes of potato or apple at random and asking them to identify which is which. For extra fun, don’t give them anything to drink. If they can consistently identify what they are eating, and whistle at the same time, they are truly talented (and a really good sport).

So, what does this have to do with love? Well, everything. For starters, it tells us that the way to a man’s heart isn’t through his stomach it’s through his nose (which is a much more evocative image, really). Secondly, it tells us that the way we smell may also be perceived of as the way we taste, which in certain cultures might be strongly related to survival as well as romance.

Now, let’s assume that we want to maximize our romantic olfactory impact. What should we do? Overall, the best advice seems to be to minimize your use of artificial scents or thick make-up, and use unscented deodorant. This is important.

Research has shown that estrogen-like compounds affect sexually responsive parts of a man’s hypothalamus, but not those of a woman. Conversely, testosterone-like substances stimulate sexually responsive parts of a woman’s hypothalamus, but not those of a man. And where do these estrogen and testosterone-like substances come from? Your armpits, of course! Yes, the specialized apocrine scent glands in your armpits are going to woo the hypothalamus of your future true love. So lay off the Old Spice or, whatever you women use. You may not like the way you smell, but you’re not really supposed to. On the other hand, men, don’t skimp on bathing. Women have a sense of smell that is roughly 3 times stronger than that of men.

Finally, men, if you want to really stack the deck, drive a new car.

Michael Stoddart in The Scented Ape: The Biology and Culture of Human Odour has noted that the molecular ingredients of that “new car smell” caused by all the new leather, rubber, plastic and vinyl are analogs of natural human sexual steroids. Vinyl in particular contains the chemical compound ethylene, which resembles the male steroid testosterone.