It appears the settings etc. of this experiment were too extreme if not counterproductive! Most likely, the samples used in this experiment were simply too old and not fresh enough! 😊 Could this be a case of junk science?
What about e.g. those men who are said to have dog noses? 😊
"... To find out, the team recruited 29 women to provide samples of urine, saliva, and/or armpit odor, collected via cotton pads worn overnight. The women provided a total of 10 samples from before, during and after their fertile windows. First, researchers analyzed the chemical composition of the armpit smells, looking for similarities between ovulating women that might suggest chemical fertility hints. No luck. Then, 91 men agreed to come into the lab for a sniff test: They smelled the armpit odor samples and rated them for pleasantness, attractiveness, and intensity. The men showed no preference for women who were ovulating; smelly superpower debunked, the researchers say."
From the abstract:
"Although men’s attraction to women’s body odour has been suggested to vary over the ovulatory cycle, peaking around the fertile window, we still lack methodologically robust evidence corroborating this effect. Further, the chemical underpinnings of male preference for the odour of ovulating women remain unknown. Here, we combined perceptual and chemical analyses to investigate the axillary odour of naturally cycling women over 10 days, covering the gradual change in fertility across the ovulatory cycle with a focus on fertile days. The fertile state was confirmed by urinary ovulation tests as well as salivary oestradiol and progesterone levels. Men rated the scent of unfamiliar women, resembling a first encounter. We used multivariate analyses to relate variation in both odour ratings and chemical composition to female conception probability, temporal distance to ovulation and ovarian hormone levels. Our results provide no evidence that males prefer the odour of fertile women. Furthermore, the volatile analysis indicated no link between axillary odour composition and current fertility status. Together, our results showed no convincing support for a chemical fertility cue in women’s axillary odour, questioning the presence of olfactory fertility information that is recognizable during first encounters in modern humans."
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