A woman’s face is rated as more attractive than others if it is surrounded by a nice perfume. On the contrary, according to American scientific research, fragrance does not necessarily make her look younger to those around her.
The study reveals that fragrances not only “pull” on the olfactory level, but to a certain extent change the way the brain visually perceives a woman. The researchers, led by neuroscientist Janina Sobert of the Monell Center for Chemical Sensations in Philadelphia and Jean-Marc Desirier of Unilever, who published the paper in the journal PLoS One, experimented with a group of 18 volunteers, two-thirds of whom were women.
Volunteers were asked to rate the attractiveness and age of eight female faces in photographs. During the evaluation process, the researchers deliberately released various odours into the room, ranging from highly unpleasant (e.g. fishy smell) to very pleasant (smell of rose oil).
The experiment showed that the more pleasant the diffuse smell was, the more positively affected the volunteers’ judgement, who gave higher ratings to the photos of the women. “Perfume beauty and facial beauty are unified into a single emotional evaluation, which probably indicates a common neural processing area in the brain,” Sobert said.
On the other hand, perfumes had a different effect on age estimation. The pleasant aromas influenced the volunteers to see the older female faces in the photos as older than their actual age, and the younger faces as even younger than they actually were. Instead, the unpleasant aromas “led” the volunteers to see more similar aged and younger faces in the photos.
The researchers plan to continue similar experiments with photographs of men to see if the effect of fragrances on the attractiveness of men’s faces.
For many centuries, perfumes have been used by women in particular as an integral part of their charm and to enhance their appearance. This study proves that, even instinctively, they knew exactly what they were doing!
