Love, Sex And Pheromones: Who's Your True Biological Match?
A woman can tell if she's attracted to a man based on his scent, but is this deceptive?
Sexual scent has been studied time and time again. It has been proven that a woman's keen sense of smell can attract a mate—but most relationships and marriages are not true biological matches. A woman's body will react to a man's pheromones if he's a true biological match for her. Her body will begin to release hormones when in contact with a man she has a natural chemical attraction to and blood will rush to her breasts, cheeks, ears and lips. At an unconscious level, the female body understands that this man can produce healthy children.
In 1995, a Swiss zoologist named Claus Wedekind ran a test study called "The Sweaty T-shirt Experiment." He wanted to test a woman's sense of smell to male odors. He put together 49 women and 44 men that were selected for their variety of MHC gene types. The men were given a clean T-shirt and asked to wear it for two nights. The scientist then placed the T-shirts in a box (the "sniff box"). Each woman was asked to smell the shirt. Their task was to sample the odor of seven boxes and describe each odor as to intensity, pleasantness and sexiness.
The results were quite interesting. Most of the women preferred the scent of males whose MHC genes were most different from her own. The study explained that this is because a woman's sense of smell helps her to mate with a person that she's not related to biologically. Two people who share a similar genetic makeup and produce children can cause a host of genetic complications.
Since humans are animals, the natural sexual scent (pheromones) can be powerful, but it's not always the defining factor in how a woman chooses her mate. Humans don't always have sex to breed; in fact, most people have sex for pleasure, intimacy, love and fun.
Sexual scent can be masked in order to ensure that the initial attraction is not just based on the way a man smells, but on his personality as well. That's why cologne is so popular and comes in a variety of different scents. Most people you will meet rarely find a true biological match and—in some cases—a man's scent can even turn a woman off without either of them knowing it. Some pheromone products on the market can also mask a man's scent, which is not always a bad thing.
A man could also be a biological match for a woman but not have the mental, social or stability factor that she really desires—this is where the animal is taken over by the human mind. For some women, it may play itself out as "lust at first sight" and only later do they realize that the sexual attraction was all that there was.
When it comes to finding a relationship, it helps to understand the difference between the human factor versus the animal smell instinct. Younger women are more prone to going by smell, leading them into relationships that may not be best suited for them. Most of the time, other people can tell a person is "in lust" before that person can understand it themselves. As far as dating goes, most people are not going to find their optimal biological match, and in reality, that only matters for mating, not dating!
So men, the next time a woman says you smell nice and you're not wearing cologne, you can bet she likes your scent. The odds of that happening are slim though, so continue taking those showers and wearing your cologne. A great-smelling cologne will score you big points.
For more information on dating and intimacy counseling, visit Dawn Michael's website.