• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Men Probably Can’t Actually Smell When Women Are Most Fertile

July 24, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Popular culture is full of scientific myths. No, the average person does not only use ten percent of their brain; sugar doesn’t make kids hyperactive; and your hair and fingernails don’t continue growing after you die. But there’s one in particular which, on the face of it, seems to have at least some scientific basis: the idea that men can tell when women are ovulating by their scent. 

Advertisement

It’s an idea that seems to pop up every decade or so. Here’s a study from 2020 that supports it, for example; here’s one from 2009 saying the same. Another study, this time from 2004, reiterates the idea;  here’s one from 2001 suggesting it’s true; you can even go all the way back to 1975 and find papers still saying the same thing. Men, it seems, can smell fertility in women.

But just how accurate is this factoid? According to the results of a new study, potentially not very: “Using frequent odor samples from the same women and hormonal assessment of fertility, we assessed potential fertility-related shifts in axillary body odor in a twofold study combining perceptual and chemical evidence,” write the authors. “Overall, there was no compelling evidence that female fertility positively affects male odor ratings.”

In fact, not only can men probably not pick up on the changes in a woman’s scent throughout her menstrual cycle, but those changes may not even exist at all: “The chemical composition of a woman’s axillary odor was not affected by her current fertile state,” the team discovered, or her “fluctuating ovarian hormone level.” 

All of this adds up to the question: where did this notion ever come from?

Well, one clue may be in the methodology of this study versus previous research. “In most studies, men assessed fertility information of one woman over her cycle, thus simulating repeated encounters with the same woman,” the authors explain. In contrast, the new study “aimed to investigate whether men are able to detect female fertility from a single encounter.”

Advertisement

To that end, the male participants in the study were given 24 odor samples to rate over two separate sessions. No man received a sample from the same woman twice; the samples were distributed completely randomly, and rotated around the room systematically until every man had sniffed every woman.

And the results, if anything, showed precisely the opposite of what you’d expect. “In contrast to our predictions, axillary odor was descriptively evaluated as both less attractive and less pleasant at higher conception risk,” the authors noted – though the effect was very weak. Overall, they concluded, “we found no compelling indication that men’s perception of female axillary odors varies with female fertility.”

But another reason for the discrepancy between previous studies and the new paper is even more basic. “The majority of [prior] evidence lacks a direct assessment of female reproductive hormones, reliable hormonal confirmation of ovulation and depicts considerable inconsistencies in estimating the fertile window,” the authors point out – or to put it another way: nobody actually checked if the women really were ovulating when they thought they were.

This paper, on the other hand, confirmed where in their fertility cycle female participants were via both urinary and saliva samples. Not only that, but the team utilized cutting-edge technology to objectively evaluate the women’s aromas: “Chemical profiles of women’s axillary odor, measured with gas chromatography–mass spectrometry […] were used to assess whether changes in the abundance of chemical compounds occur in association with female fertility,” they explain. 

Advertisement

Combine all this with the well-documented publication bias against null effects – that is to say, people aren’t that interested in reading studies that don’t tell them weird things like “men can smell when you’re ovulating” – and it basically adds up to a never-ending circle of confirmation bias. 

So, it may be true that men can subconsciously tell when a woman is ovulating – but not an unfamiliar woman, and not by her scent alone. All in all, the most we can conclude is “more research needed” – including, as the team points out, revisiting some of the old results that got us here in the first place.

“We are certainly still at the beginning of understanding the physiological interaction between the gradual fluctuations in fertility and ovarian hormones across the ovulatory cycle and women’s body odor,” the paper concludes. “We strongly encourage further disentangling the physiological basis as well as the social function of olfactory cues to female fertility in humans with the robust methods we have at hand.”

The study is published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Canada’s Conservatives pledge big spending, deficit reduction in election platform
  2. Evolito’s electric motors look set to take off in aerospace where YASA left off in automotive
  3. TWIS: Newly Discovered CRISPR-Like Systems May Be Used To Edit Human Genomes, Reconstructed Face Of 50,000-Year-Old Ancient Ancestor, And Much More This Week
  4. Can Peacocks Fly?

Source Link: Men Probably Can't Actually Smell When Women Are Most Fertile

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • If Birds Are Dinosaurs, Why Are None As Big As T. Rexes?
  • Psychologists Demonstrate Illusion That Could Be Screwing Up Our Perception Of Time
  • Why Are So Many Enormous Roman Shoes Being Discovered At Hadrian’s Wall?
  • Scientists Think They’ve Pinpointed Structural Differences In Psychopaths’ Brains
  • We’ve Found Our Third-Ever Interstellar Visitor, Orcas Filmed Kissing (With Tongues) In The Wild, And Much More This Week
  • The “Eyes Of Clavius” Will Be Visible On The Moon Today, Thanks To Clair-Obscur Effect
  • Shockingly High Microplastic Levels Found On Remote Mediterranean Coral Reef Island
  • Interstellar Object, Cheesy Nightmares, And Smooching Orcas
  • World’s Largest Martian Meteorite Up For Auction Could Reach Whopping $2-4 Million
  • Kimalu The Beluga Whale Undergoes Pioneering Surgery And Becomes First Beluga To Survive General Aesthetic
  • The 1986 Soviet Space Mission That’s Never Been Repeated: Mir To Salyut And Back Again
  • Grisly Incident In Yellowstone National Park Shows Just How Dangerous This Vibrant Wilderness Can Be
  • Out Of All Greenhouse Gas Emitters On Earth, One US Organization Takes The Biscuit
  • Overly Ambitious Adder Attempts To Eat Hare 10 Times Its Mass In Gnarly Video
  • How Fast Does A Spacecraft Need To Go To Escape The Solar System?
  • President Trump’s Cuts To USAID Could Result In A “Staggering” 14 Million Avoidable Deaths By 2030
  • Dzo: Hybrids Beasts That Are Perfectly Crafted For Life On Earth’s Highest Mountains
  • “Rarest Event Ever” Had A Half-Life 1 Trillion Times Longer Than The Age Of The Universe – How Did We See It?
  • Meet The Bille, A Self-Righting Tetrahedron That Nobody Was Sure Could Exist
  • Neurogenesis Confirmed: Adult Brains Really Do Make New Hippocampal Neurons
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version