Go on, raise a stink
When I was in my early 20s, I shared an apartment with the guitarist from my band. We had separate bedrooms, and I had to walk past his to get to mine. About three months into our “Odd Couple” arrangement, I began to detect an odor wafting from within. Even though 40-plus years have passed, it’s still fresh in my olfactory memory, much as the smell of ballpark hot dogs or the heady aroma of a first prom date never quite leave us. Only this smell was B.O.
Not wanting to offend my best friend, I bought an Airwick room freshener and secreted it behind the window shade in his room. Weeks passed; the smell became fainter. Then one day I came home to find a large gash in the wallboard in our kitchen.
“How’d that happen?” I asked my friend.
“Tracy (his girlfriend) threw a pot at me,” he explained.
“Why?”
“Because I found an air freshener in my room and told her I didn’t appreciate it.”
“I put that there!” I said, sheepishly.
“Geez, why didn’t you just tell me?” he responded, hurt. “Tracy doesn’t like me to wear deodorant because she says she likes me to smell like a man.”
I didn’t ask why that man had to be Cro-Magnon.
But belated kudos to Tracy, who apparently was decades ahead of the curve on the beneficial effects of smelling sweat.
Indeed, as the abstract of a recent study by Utrecht University in the Netherlands states: “We observed that exposure to body odor collected from senders of chemosignals in a happy state induced a facial expression and perceptual-processing style indicative of happiness in the receivers of those signals.”
That is, smelling the sweat of a happy person – the smellee – can spur happy feelings in you, the smeller.
Now, everyone knows that perspiration can elicit negative emotions, as in my reaction to my friend’s man-cave musk. But can chemosignals also prompt happy feelings? Apparently bored with trying to cure communicable diseases, researchers set up the following test:
Twelve men were asked to watch movies that provoked feelings of fear or happiness; a control group watched neutral scenes. Researchers gathered sweat samples, then asked 36 women to smell the sweat-soaked pads. Remarkably, all 36 agreed. After observing the facial expressions of the women after each sniff, researchers concluded that the women smiled more when they inhaled the smell of happy men. This explains a lot about Snow White’s dwarf-induced state of bliss.
This isn’t the first time scientists have entered the underarms race. Back in 1990, Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia announced that researchers had discovered the chemical that produces offensive locker-room odors: 3-methyl-2-hexenoic acid, or, in layman’s terms, 1-dredfyl-B-O. Techniques haven’t changed much. Scientists instructed six male volunteers to use no deodorants or soap for a week before they began the two-week study. The men washed themselves with a non-deodorant soap once a day before wearing cotton pads in their armpits for eight hours. After each eight-hour stretch, the men put the pads in a jar and froze them until scientists could conduct a series of laboratory tests.
Feminists, take note: Women were not involved in this round of the race to the Nobel Pits Prize. That 36 women were required to smell the sweat of 12 men in the Utrecht University study proves how far “the fairer sex” has come in a mere quarter-century.
At the time of the Monell study, scientists hoped their findings could be used to help the $1.6 billion underarm deodorant industry make more effective products. As it turns out, their research may have deprived an entire generation of the happy feelings it would have experienced if people had smelled worse.
So, next time you encounter a group of the great unwashed, don’t turn up your nose.
Stop, and smell the bozos.