Good friends have similar 'body odor'



There are many people who have had the experience of calming down by smelling their own house and feeling uplifted by smelling their partner. Studies have pointed out that such 'smell' has a potential effect on the human brain, and in fact, close friends may have similar 'body odor'.

There is chemistry in social chemistry

https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abn0154

Does Your Nose Help Pick Your Friends? --The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/science/friendship-scent-odor.html

Friends Who'Click' Have Something Peculiar in Common: Their Smell
https://www.sciencealert.com/friends-who-click-smell-similar

Inbal Ravreby and colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel note that non-human terrestrial mammals distinguish between enemies and allies by scenting them. Chemical analysis and human volunteer research, assuming that 'humans unknowingly find similarities in body odor by sniffing themselves and others, which may promote friendship.' It was conducted.

First, Ravreby and colleagues wash their bodies with unscented soap for two days, avoiding garlic and other fragrant foods and using perfumes, and staying separate from their partners. Instructed to sleep in the room. We provided an additional T-shirt and asked to wear it for at least 6 hours each night. The shirt was stored frozen after the second day of wear and thawed 1 hour before analysis.

Ravreby and colleagues then put the T-shirt on a small gas analyzer called the 'PEN3 eNose' to see if there was a chemical similarity in body odor. We also asked some volunteers to smell two randomly selected T-shirts to see if they were similar.



From these experiments, it was found that both PEN3 eNose and humans judged that the smell of friends was 'similar' to that of strangers. However, although humans could judge well when comparing two T-shirts, it seems that it was not easy to judge whether the smells were similar when three T-shirts were prepared.

Ravreby and colleagues further examined whether strangers would hit each other for the first time and predict from the smell. In this experiment, we asked people who met for the first time to play a 'mirror game' that silently imitated each other's hand movements for 2 minutes at a close distance.

In this experiment, a total of 66 pairs were born, but one-third of the pairs answered that they 'get along with the other person'. Then, when eNose was applied to a sample of the odors of the pair who answered that they were in tune, it was found that the pair who was in tune had a significantly higher chemical similarity than the pair who did not like it. In addition, he succeeded in predicting 'whether or not he feels comfortable' with 71% accuracy from the similarity of odors.



Ravreby et al. 'In the case of humans, the role of the sense of smell is denied by various social taboos, leading to the view that the sense of smell is not important to human sociality. What if you think, 'You start to be interested in the other person by your sense of smell.' The slight odor may have more mysteries than ever known. '

in Science, Posted by log1p_kr