Proven: the smell of male sweat turns women on

2024 Author: James Gerald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 14:00

Surely many women caught themselves thinking that they like watching a working or exercising man. And some love to watch beads of sweat trickle down their muscular arms and mighty chest … Sound familiar? Now imagine that a woman is influenced not only by the sight, but also by the smell of man's sweat.

These are the conclusions reached by American scientists from the University of California at Berkeley, proving that even the faint smell of a man's sweat is enough for heterosexual women to feel sexual arousal.

The hormone androstadienedione, a musky-smelling chemical that increases blood pressure, heart rate and respiration rate, and raises levels of the steroid hormone cortisol, has been found in men's sweat. The latter is responsible for stress and sexual arousal.

Professor Noam Sobel says that human beings, like rats, moths and butterflies, emit an odor that directly affects the physiological processes in the body of the opposite sex. Until androstadienedione was found in men's sweat, there was no scientific evidence to support the advertising claims of perfume manufacturers that humans, like animals and insects, react to pheromones.

As it turned out, this substance even affects the female mood, and for the better. It also affects the hormones responsible for the ovulation processes in the female body.

One of the research methods was to measure the level of the hormone cortisol in the saliva of 48 women, whose average age was 21 years, after 20 breaths over a container of androstadienone. The hormone increased in about 15 minutes and remained high for an hour. At the same time, the experimental ladies noted an improvement in mood and sexual arousal; their blood pressure increased, their heartbeat and breathing accelerated.

From other interesting research results: it was found that if the sweat of one woman somehow gets on the upper lip of another woman, then her menstrual cycle begins to fluctuate, coinciding with the cycle of the first woman.

In another experiment, the researchers asked the first group of participants to rate the attractiveness of the men in the photographs. The second group of women had to do the same, but next to them secretly hidden clothes with traces of male sweat. As a result, the girls from the second group, who got under the influence of pheromones, not only highly appreciated the sexual attractiveness of those men who were "rejected" by the girls of the first group, but also indicated a higher level of attractiveness for all men in the photographs.

To exclude the change in hormonal levels under the influence of strong stimulation of the olfactory receptors, the scientists also tested the effect of the smell of culinary yeast. This product did not cause similar reactions in the study participants.

However, research has shown that the smell of sweat has little effect on those taking birth control pills. Apparently, as a result of the hormones contained in these drugs, women's response to natural signs of attractiveness is reduced.

Only heterosexual women were involved in the experiment, since the “smell of a man” can affect lesbians in a slightly different way. Scientists suggest that male sweat contains other components that affect the physiological processes in the female body.

All of the above does not mean that men should forget about perfumes and daily showers. After all, there are still more other substances with a very unpleasant odor in sweat than pheromones, so the strong smell of sweat does not attract, but repels.