What Having A Stinky Friend Says About You

Everybody has a personal body odor but let’s face it, not all of those odors are going to be pleasant. Quite honestly, there are some that are better avoided but sometimes, those odors show up on your friends.

Nobody really wants to talk about body odor, but we know no more about it thanks to a study that was published in ScienceAdvances.

That study shows that most people tend to find platonic friends of the same sex that have a similar odor to themselves. In other words, if your friend is a little rank, you might want to consider your own BO.

Inbal Ravreby also has something to say on the subject. They are well-qualified, because they are a doctoral student studying at the Weizmann Institute of science. They also happen to be the lead author of the study, and according to UPI, they said: “The gist is that people who ‘click’ with each other have similar body odor.”

In order to find 20 same-sex friends who would agree to be part of the study and said that they were friends from the first moment they saw each other, it took six months on social media. The fact that they bonded almost instantly showed how strong that sense is between them.

In order to ensure that the study was focused in the right direction, they also put together some complete strangers in pairs that were grouped depending upon their body odor. Those individuals were invited to play a game with each other and report if they felt comfortable with the other person by the time the game was over.

According to the research, people who had similar scents to each other not only liked each other, they also felt that there was a chemistry between them and that they could be friends.

In order to determine which people could be paired up with each other for this experiment, they used an electronic nose with odor sensors. Humans were also used in the study to smell others and predict if they would be friends or not.

Ravreby went on to talk about the participants that were paired up with each other, saying: “We found that by chemical body odor similarity as indicated by the electronic nose, we could predict clicking [with] 71% accuracy.”

She went on to mention how the human ratings were subjective because researchers were not trained so they might be representative of an untrained population.

“In our electronic nose there are 10 metal oxide sensors, each coated with a different material conferring chemical specificity,” Ravreby said. “Thus, each sample is potentially made of 10 responses that combine to generate a specific pattern associated with an odor. For our body odor samples, five sensors were activated.”

The results are undeniable. People who were part of the test, both those who were smellers and those that were paired up with each other, show that there is a type of attraction and avoidance associated with our sense of smell.

So there you have it! If you have stinky friends, it’s likely you’re one of them.