CAN鈥橳 stand that cologne you got for Christmas? Small wonder: new research
suggests that your genes help determine which perfume you prefer.
People have long used perfumes to boost their sexual attractiveness. While
it鈥檚 widely believed that perfumes are used to mask a person鈥檚 own odour, some
researchers have suggested that they may actually be used to augment and
advertise it.
Manfred Milinski at the Max Planck Institute for Limnology in Pl枚n,
Germany, and Claus Wedekind, now at the University of Edinburgh, wanted to see
which is true. They asked 137 male and female students from the University of
Bern to sniff 36 scents on paper strips bearing smells such as vanilla, jasmine,
lilac and bergamot.
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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
鈥涡苍辫濒别补蝉补苍迟鈥�.
Milinski and Wedekind figured 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.
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 the
March-April issue of Behavioral Ecology, the team say their findings
suggest that people pick out perfumes to amplify their body odours鈥攚hich
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� However,
Avery Gilbert, of the Sense of Smell Institute in New York, says: 鈥淎nything that
tells us about a biological basis for smell preference is extremely interesting.
笔别谤颈辞诲鈥�.