The Nose Knows

Language of body odors

Philosopher Gustav Jaeger insisted that man's soul lies in his smells. Wilhelm Fliess, a Berlin doctor and friend of Freud's, regarded the nose as the most important sexual organ. Pop Sexologist Alex Comfort predicts sex signals will be found in underarm odors. In Scent Signals, Author Janet Hopson says "sexones," or sex odors, guide human sexuality.

Serious scientists have a few hunches of their own about odor power. The late anthropologist Louis Leakey suggested that body odor was a key evolutionary defense mechanism--predators may have attacked early humans only as a last resort because they smelled too bad to be good food. In Lives of a Cell, Scientist-Essayist Lewis Thomas says that the Government ought perhaps to set up a National Institute on Human Fragrance.

He may be on the right track. The recent identification of numerous pheromones, or scent signals, in insects and other animals has given odor research new legitimacy. Scientists now know that different organisms use pheromones to gather food, send out sexual cues, mark territory, maintain social pecking orders, sound alarms. Male dogs, for instance, use urine scent to say, in effect: watch out, a tough mutt just passed by.

If animals can send out such unconscious messages, do humans have the same skills? Perhaps, say some researchers. One tantalizing clue comes from "menstrual synchrony," the common phenomenon of women who are close friends, or live together. In 1971 University of Chicago Psychologist Martha McClintock, then at Harvard, tested 135 women and showed that the menstrual cycles of friends and roommates moved from an average of 8.5 days apart to less than 5 days during a school year.

Psychologist Michael Russell thinks the synchronizing factor is odor. In an experiment at San Francisco State University, Russell relied on a colleague named Genevieve, who had a regular 28-day cycle, did not shave under her arms and never used deodorant. He dabbed what he delicately called "Essence of Genevieve" on the lips of five female volunteers three times a week. After four months, he found that the volunteers converged from an average of 9.3 days apart in their cycles to 3.4 days, and four of the women synchronized to within one day of Genevieve's cycle. A control group of six dabbed only with alcohol showed no change. Russell is also testing whether mothers and babies can identify one another by smell. Says he: "It looks like there's something of very basic importance occurring via the olfactory sense."

Other researchers are making a connection between sexuality and odor. The University of Colorado's Richard Doty conducted more than 100,000 sniff tests to determine changes in the ability of volunteers to detect a chemical called furfural, a scent found in cloves and cinnamon. One clear result: women have the greatest ability to detect the odor midway in their menstrual cycle, presumably because of a correlation between estrogen in the body and sensitivity at the nose.

At the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, experimenters have also shown that certain mouth and vaginal odors change regularly during the menstrual cycle. That raises the possibility that odor tests may one day help develop a new contraceptive, an idea supported by the monkey studies of Monell Primatologist Gisela Epple. She found that the dominant male and dominant female in each social group spend much of their time smearing their scent around the cages. Surprisingly, subdominant females do not get pregnant when they mate with the top male. Epple suspects that a scent signal from the dominant female suppresses the fertility of her rivals.

Smell experimenters admit that they have not yet proved much. As Russell points out, there is "no unifying theory on how the nose works and no money for experiments because you couldn't show any utility. But that's changing.' If so, Thomas may yet get his fragrance institute. qed

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