Study: Women Know You're Attracted to Them by Scent

Women can sense a man’s interest levels from his odor. A girl who smells interest ‘wakes up’ out of autopilot – and must decide if she likes him back too.

Approach enough girls and it becomes pretty obvious that women can kind of tell when you genuinely want them versus when you’re just phoning it in.

You might wonder though, how do they tell? Is it the way you smile? Some subtle change in your behavior? A study by psychologists at Houston’s Rice University found women respond subconsciously to men’s “sexual sweat”:

Our results here show that the brain also recognizes the socioemotional information contained in the human sexual sweat. This is so despite the facts that subjects were verbally unaware of the nature of the olfactory stimuli and that the intensity and pleasantness differences had been statistically controlled for. Our findings provide olfactory evidence that the right orbitofrontal cortex and the right fusiform participate in the processing of chemosensory human socioemotional information. Moreover, they also offer neural support for the existence of affective communication through human sociochemosensory cues, a subject extensively studied in animal research but hitherto little known in humans.

Women do not consciously realize they’re responding to the scent of a man’s sweat (the study examined only women smelling men’s scents). It happens at a level below that of conscious awareness. But they nevertheless still do recognize it, and their brains respond in a different way to sexual sweat than they do to neutral sweat or other smells.