Latest research and scientific study on the odours given out by male and female genitals and armpits have unlocked a whole new world of mysterious scents that play a key role in human sexuality

Edward Gunter

The scent of a man’s pubic area, scrotum, armpits and a woman’s vagina is primarily controlled by colonies of healthy bacteria that populate these regions. The word bacteria shouldn’t freak you out. We deal with healthy bacteria all the time. They form part of our diet, for instance, probiotics — which are usually beneficial bacteria — provide all sorts of powerful benefits for your body and brain. Taken in an optimal way, they may improve digestive health, reduce depression and promote heart health. Some evidence suggests they may even give you better-looking skin.

Such bacteria can be found in human private parts also. Dr. Richard Bremer, lead physician at the Oak Ridge Hospital, Tennessee, who won the 2018  Michelson Prize, given away to  young investigators who apply disruptive research concepts and inventive processes to advance human research for major global diseases, has just finished a detailed study of human scents and their impact on human sexuality over the years.

After long dismissing the search for a human pheromone as folly, Bremer’s research has forced scientists to take a fresh look at how human body odor influences sexual attraction. The magic scent is not some romantic elixir but the aromatic effluence of our immune system. The only trouble is we don’t give it half a chance. How do we humans announce, and excite, sexual availability? Many animals do it with their own biochemical bouquets known as pheromones. “Why do bulls and horses turn up their nostrils when excited by love?” Charles Darwin pondered deep in one of his seminal works. Natural selection designed animals to produce two, and only two, types of odors—defensive ones, like the skunk’s, and scents for territorial marking and mate attracting, like that exuded by the male musk deer and bottled by perfumers everywhere. The evaluative sniffing that mammals engage in during courtship were clues that scent is the chemical equivalent of the peacock’s plumage or the nightingale’s song—finery with which to attract mates.

There is evolutionary biology at play too. Early men, and women, lived in groups of 8-10, as evidenced by human remains found in multiple places around the globe (Israel, Laos, Austria, Peru, Tanzania, Upper Kazakhstan and parts of South India). An improvement in the dating of fossils suggests that the Neanderthals, a heavily muscled, thick-boned human species adapted to living in ice age Europe, perished about 44,000 years ago. In a majority of the places, the bone structure and mating rituals of our ancestors suggested that men identified their sexual partners in the dark of the night often through intimate smells. The Jebel Irhoud Skulls found in Morocco in 1960 (dating back to 30,000 years) pointed at several groups of alpha men, attracted by the smell of other women, and also younger men, possibly mating with both sexes. Most archeologists are agreed that such sexual encounters were frequent.

Scent And Sentiment

Curiously, remembering a smell is usually difficult—yet when exposed to certain scents, many people—of whom Marcel Proust is the paragon—may suddenly recall a distant childhood memory in emotionally rich detail. Some aromas even affect us physiologically. Laboratory researchers exploring human olfaction have found that: A faint trace of lemon significantly increases people’s perception of their own health. Lavender incense contributes to a pleasant mood—but it lowers volunteers’ mathematical abilities. A whiff of eucalyptus increases people’s respiratory rate. Oud oil, distilled from agarwood, reduces blood pressure. Such findings have led to the rapid development of an aromatherapy industry. Aromatherapists point to scientific findings that smell can dramatically affect our moods as evidence that therapy with aromatic oils can help buyers manage their emotional lives.

Mood is demonstrably affected by scent. For several decades scientists have studied the way people are attracted to other people’s special brand of human smell. It sounds weird, but every so often, a chemically compatible match comes along and…you get all caught up in a phenomenon we’re calling body-odor attraction. It may often be the scent of the opposite sex and in many cases the scent of the same sex. And, no, you are not alone. Actually, anyone who denies this is the outlier here. That’s the power of smell. Modern study demonstrates that the populations of vaginal bacteria attracts men because of the evolutionary trait. Most men would want to smell a vagina and even kiss it (which may not be an unhealthy thing to do – unless the woman is unclean). Similarly the presence of good genital bacteria in men’s scrotum is a turn on for the opposite sex, or the same sex. Someone licking at the scrotum, for example, may be an primal act of imbibing a healthy dose of bacteria. The woke joke in modern scientific community is that if someone you invited home for dinner and drinks suddenly asks you for healthy food, well you know what to pull out. Your wiener is a health bar of a different kind.

Taste, too?

Sex specialists are often asked about the taste of a patient’s vagina. Taste is a combination of many factors, including scent, flavor, temperature and even touch. In the right situation and with the right partner the taste of a vagina is typically pleasing. There is an urban myth that eating pineapple can change vaginal taste. This is not biologically possible. While pineapple does have aromatic compounds that give it that pineapple smell, even if these compounds survived digestion and metabolism, your urine and sweat would be smelling sweet and tropical long before your vagina did.

What could be a source of what might be our very own pheromone? Humans possess three major types of skin glands—sebaceous glands, eccrine (or sweat) glands, and apocrine glands. Sebaceous glands are most common on the face and forehead but occur around all of the body’s openings, including eyelids, ears, nostrils, lips, and nipples.

The sweat glands exude water and salt and are non-odorous in healthy people. That leaves the third potential source of a human pheromone—the apocrine gland. Apocrine glands hold special promise as the source of smells that might affect interpersonal interactions. They do not serve any temperature-managing functions in people, as they do in other animals.

Men’s apocrine glands are larger than women’s, and they secrete most actively during times of nervousness or excitement. Hair provides surface area from which apocrine smells can diffuse. (Is it any coincidence that hair at the arm pit and the genitals sprouts at puberty, when apocrine glands start producing food for our skin bacteria?)

Most promising of all, apocrine glands exude odorous steroids known to illicit sexual behavior in other mammals. Androsterone—a steroid related to the one that nearly doomed the hapless musk deer—is one such substance. Men secrete more androsterone than women do, and this is the reason most men smell hotter than females. This is not to suggest that women smell less attractive (right use of cosmetics and perfume does the trick) but the magic lies in androsterone.

Androsterone helps act as a prosthetic tickle to parts of your brain, namely the hypothalamus and pituitary gland that kick up your levels of 1-testosterone. This action places it in the pro-hormone category, which in theory makes it a win-win because you’re unlikely to suffer the negative side effects of increased oestrogen that you’re likely to have accrued from your mother’s womb. It is highly possible that if men are blindfolded, as Swedish researchers experimented in an MRI scan (2005) of 200 university students, and their arms tied behind their back, and placed equidistant (at a distance of 6 cm) from a naked male (age 27-44) and naked female (same age bracket), men tended to like the natural smell of other boys.

Using brain imaging, Swedish researchers found new evidence that men can in fact send and receive subconscious odor signals. And, they, it seems, respond to the smells differently. “This is the chief reason Neanderthal skeletal remains of males have always been found side by side, strongly suggesting that they co-slept (apart from mating with their female counterparts), primarily turned on by the smell of their own sex (in an age of no deodorants, cosmetics and perfumes). There is a strong reason to conclude that since religion (which was a much later construct) played no role at all in their private and public lives, Neanderthals enjoyed the smells, no matter the origin of the flower (vulva or scrotum). Modern man basically is genetically wired like that plus or minus, of course, the societal constructs,” notes Dr. Richard Bremer.

Whoever said make me a fragrance that smells like love was in all possibility right.