Male Body Odour: Vanilla or?

By brightfeather on September 16th, 2007

Grandmother used to say that men sweat — women “glow.” But, who among us hasn’t taken a surreptitious whiff under the arms on a hot, humid summer’s day? Forget the glow — as temperatures soar, so does our tendency to worry about body odor and wetness.It’s no wonder we worry. The skin, considered the largest organ of the body, is home to some two million sweat glands. Under normal circumstances, these glands secrete up to 6 cups of sweat per day. But, when the weather turns toasty that amount can easily increase to more than 17 cups! The Protection Racket

Largest study of its kind reveals that an ingredient in male body odor can smell like urine or take on a vanilla scent depending on single odorant receptor gene. Yes, it’s all in the genes.

Androstenone, a derivative of testosterone that is a potent ingredient in male body odor, can smell like either - depending on your genes. While many people perceive a foul odor from androstenone, usually that of stale urine or strong sweat, others find the scent sweet and pleasant like vanilla. Still others cannot smell it at all.

Androstenone, found in higher concentrations in the urine and sweat of men than of women, is used by some mammals to convey social and sexual information, and the ability to perceive androstenone’s scent may have far-reaching behavioral implications for humans.

New research from Rockefeller University, performed in collaboration with scientists at Duke University in North Carolina, reveals for the first time that this extreme variability in people’s perception of androstenone is due in large part to genetic variations in a single odorant receptor called OR7D4. The research is reported September 16 as an advance online publication of the journal Nature.

Although it has long been suspected that the ability to perceive the odor of androstenone is genetically determined, this study is the first to identify variations in a single gene that account for a large part of why people perceive androstenone’s scent so differently. Source

A 2005 study shows that gay men respond differently from straight men when exposed to a suspected sexual stimulus found in male sweat. When homosexual men smelled the odor of male sweat—more specifically, a chemical in the male hormone testosterone—their brains responded similarly to those of women.