Your genes help determine which perfume you prefer, according to new research.
People have long used perfumes to try to boost their sexual attractiveness but whether this is to mask a person鈥檚 own odour to actually augment and advertise it is not known.
To find out, Manfred Milinski at the Max Planck Institute for Limnology in Plon, Germany, and Claus Wedekind, now at the University of Edinburgh, asked 137 male and female students from the University of Bern to sniff 36 scents on paper strips. The strips bore smells such as vanilla, jasmine, lilac and bergamot.
Advertisement
The volunteers were asked to consider each scent as a potential perfume they would wear, and rate each fragrance on a scale ranging from 鈥減leasant鈥� to 鈥渦npleasant鈥�.
Milinski and Wedekind reasoned that if people use perfume to advertise their own smells, there would be a correlation between perfume preference and genes that encode the body鈥檚 major histocompatibility complex proteins. MHC proteins play an important role in a vertebrate鈥檚 immune system, and are also known to influence body odour. The researchers took blood samples from each volunteer to determine which MHC genes they had.
Odour amplification
They found that people who shared certain MHC genes tended to like the same scents. When the experiment was repeated two years later, the volunteers鈥� preferences remained largely unchanged.
In a paper to be published in Behavioral Ecology, the team say their findings suggest that people pick out perfumes to amplify their body odours 鈥� which in turn advertise the genetic make-up of their immune system.
Rachel Herz, a smell expert at Brown University in Rhode Island, says that the study doesn鈥檛 take into account other influences on odour preference. 鈥淟earning and familiarity really do play a very strong role in liking and disliking smell,鈥� she says.
Adolescent girls and old ladies tend to like different scents, she adds. 鈥淏ut you have the same MHC at 15 as at 75.鈥�