Wearing a nice perfume doesn’t just make a woman smell better — it can in fact make her appear more facially beautiful.
The exact same woman tends to be rated as more physically attractive when there is a pleasant smell present, finds a new study.
Researchers conclude that perceptions of physical facial beauty are emotionally driven rather than rational.
But while a spritz of something sexy might make a woman look better, it won’t do anything for older women who wish to look younger, or a young woman hoping to come off as more mature, finds the study.
A pleasant scent was found to make younger faces look even more youthful — and older faces look even older.
Perfumes and scented products may, to some extent, alter how people perceive one another physically, suggest researchers.
Monell Chemical Senses Center conducted the research and and reveal that while women’s faces are rated as progressively more attractive in the presence of pleasant smells, the rate of odour pleasantness has a less correlational effect on guessing age.
‘Odour pleasantness and facial attractiveness integrate into one joint emotional evaluation,’ said lead author Janina Seubert, PhD, a cognitive neuroscientist who was a postdoctoral fellow at Monell at the time the research was conducted.
‘This may indicate a common site of neural processing in the brain.’
Perfumes and scented products have been used for centuries as a way to enhance overall personal appearance, reports Science Daily.
Previous studies have shown perception of facial attractiveness could be influenced when using unpleasant versus pleasant odours — but it was not known whether odours influence the actual visual perception of facial features or alternatively, how faces are emotionally evaluated by the brain.
The current study design centered on the principle that judging attractiveness and age involve two different processing methods: attractiveness is regarded as an emotional process while judgments of age are believed to be cognitive, or rationally-based.
In the study, published in open access journal PLOS ONE, 18 young adults were asked to rate the attractiveness and age of eight female faces of various ages.
While evaluating the images, one of five odours was simultaneously released. These were a blend of fish oil (unpleasant) and rose oil (pleasant) that ranged from predominantly fish oil to predominantly rose oil.
The subjects were asked to rate the age of the face in the photograph, the attractiveness of the face and the pleasantness of the odor.
Across the range of odours, odour pleasantness directly influenced ratings of facial attractiveness.
This suggests that olfactory (sense of smell) and visual cues independently influence judgments of facial attractiveness, Daily Mail informs.
