This is the reason why you are drawn to your partner's body odour

For most people, there’s nothing appealing about sniffing another person’s bodily smell even if they are your partner. But a new study shows that there are people who purposefully look forward to having a whiff of their beloved’s body odour, DailyMail reports. The researchers concluded that these people tend to possess an exceptionally high sex drive.

Sex and smell

Previous studies have drawn a link between smell, sexual desire and sexual behaviour. Some experts said the people are not necessarily attracted to their partner’s odour but might have come to learn to be more forgiving of it over time, according to GQ. Lindsey Bordone, M.D., assistant professor of dermatology at Columbia University Medical Center explained:

A recurring hypothesis regarding body odour and sexual attraction is that a person’s immune system influences what he or she perceives as attractive, and also influences what their own unadulterated scent would be minus all of the personal-care products.

Now, researchers from the Southern Medical University in Guangzhou took this theory a step further by surveying people in the US, China, and India about the frequency of sniffing themselves or others, and their sexual desire.

What’s new?

The purpose of the research was to determine the degree to which body odours relate to sexual desire – a research gap in previous studies. The results from data collected in three separate studies revealed that participants who said they sniffed themselves and others more often had a higher sexual desire. Women appeared to strongly exhibit this than men. The study, published in Archives of Sexual Behaviour said:

Body odours transport chemical signals that facilitate detection of immunological matches, genetics and family relatedness, thus promoting sexual mate selection. Additionally, body odour communicates the attractiveness of a potential partner.

All the results supported the theory that women put more emphasis on the sense of smell, reported higher prevalence of body odour sniffing and had lower levels of sexual desire.

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