Perfume and Physical Attraction
February 2nd, 2009Turns out, perfume is not all fashion and glamor. Research shows that our preferences are biological. Remember Lou Reed’s song from the original motion picture soundtrack of White Nights?
When I see the way you paint your lips and I smell your perfume
When I see the brand new color that you’ve dyed your hair to
I know, you know, it’s more than physical
My love, my love, my love, love is chemical
White Nights featured not only the endearing and iconoclastic tunester Lou Reed, but also the fancy feet of Mikhail Baryshnikov and tap prodigy Gregory Hines. I do not, as you may fear, digress from perfume. Once upon a time, our Russian ballet prodigy launched his own celebrity juice. Now discontinued, Misha Perfume for Women featured topnotes of peach, bergamot and lemon, a heart of jasmine, rose, raspberry, carnation and cinnamon as well as basenotes of vetiver, patchouli and amber.
Other than the simple explanation of chemical attraction, why do we prefer the scents we do? For ourselves? For others? In its December 18, 2008 article, “The scent of a man,” The Economist reported that women in an experimental setting prefer the sweaty t-shirts of men whose major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is most unlike their own. Dr. Manfred Millinski and Dr. Claus Wedekind researched this phenomenon at the University of Bern in 2001.
I am no more interested in science than you, so hang tough with the lingo for a minute. For fellow liberal-artsy types, MHC is good to mix between sex partners, as the children of unions between diverse MHC carriers will have relatively strong immune systems. In cattle terms, women like men who smell like they come from different stock.
Now what do women want from their own perfume? Millinski and Wedekind asked “Would you like to smell like that yourself?” and “Would you like your partner to smell like that?” to tease out the distinctions. Perfume preferences women express for themselves are directly correlated with their own personal flavor of the human leukocyte antigen, or human MHC (last big words I’ll use, promise!). A woman chooses perfume to amplify and broadcast her own genetic composition. But the partner, you recall, should smell of something “other,” not of “self.”
The punchline for perfume shoppers: Buy your own. According to The Economist, we are best equipped to select scent for ourselves and for close blood relatives.
