Pleasant perfume can make a woman's face more attractive, according to research by Unilever's Monell Chemical Senses Center – but it can also make her look older. “Odour pleasantness and facial attractiveness integrate into one joint emotional evaluation,” said Dr Janina Seubert, lead author of the report on the study, which was published in open access journal PLOS ONE.
The researchers asked 18 young adults, two-thirds of whom were female, to rate the attractiveness and age of the faces of eight women in photographs. The images varied in terms of ageing features. While the subjects were evaluating the images, five different odours were simultaneously released, created from blends of fish oil and rose oil (the more fishy, the more unpleasant; the more rosy, the more pleasant). The test subjects were then asked to rate the ages of the faces in the photographs, their attractiveness and the pleasantness of the smell. The pleasantness of the smell was found to directly correlate with ratings of facial attractiveness. “This suggests that olfactory and visual cues independently influence judgments of facial attractiveness,” said the study.
However, when it came to age ratings, the presence of a pleasant smell seemed to make the test subjects see the older faces as even older and the younger faces as even younger, whereas during the presence of an unpleasant smell, the younger and older faces were perceived to be more similar in age.
