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Secret signals
What is it that makes you irresistible - or a total turn-off?
New Scientist’s very own agony aunt Margot has the answers.
Q I'm an attractive thirty-something lass, but am starting to lose hope of ever finding a man. I meet promising blokes all the time - good looking, charming, well dressed, not too hairy. But there's always something missing. I can't quite put my finger on it, but often they just don't quite look right and well...smell right. Am I being too picky?
A Don't fret, love. What you're experiencing is perfectly normal and natural. A man's appearance and smell apparently reveal a lot about how compatible a mate he would make. Unfortunately, women's reactions to these cues are all subconscious, which is why you find it hard to pinpoint why you feel the way you do about guys you meet. But look at it this way: you get to sneak a peek inside their genes without them even noticing.
Take skin, for example. Craig Roberts and his team at the University of Newcastle, UK, have found that women find the skin of men with a healthier set of genes more attractive. Specifically, the team looked at three of a key set of immune system genes called the MHC genes. Scientists believe that having a mixture of different versions of these genes makes a person better able to fight off infection. When the team asked 50 women to rate the attractiveness of 92 male faces, they found the women preferred men with different versions of all three genes. Amazingly, they got similar results when they only showed the women a small piece of skin from the man's cheek. More details will be revealed in a future issue of Evolution and Human Behaviour, if you don't believe me.
Also, don't be puzzled by your preoccupation with a new man's smell. Us girls consistently rate a potential partner's odour as highly important when it comes to deciding whether we find them attractive - although men find smell less important.
Randy Thornhill an expert in body odour and attraction at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque got a similar result to the skin study, but for odour. In his experiment, women rated the smell of sweaty T-shirts worn by men overnight as more attractive if they had a similar sort of variety in their MHC genes. So if you're searching for Mr. Right, just follow your nose.
From issue 2471 of New Scientist magazine
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