What Scents Actually Turn People On? We Read the Research So You Don't Have To

Six studies on scent and attraction, from the surprisingly solid to the "please do not cite this at a dinner party."

People have been horny about body odor for a very long time.

In 16th-century France, Henry IV wrote to his mistress Gabrielle d'Estrées: "Don't wash my love, I'll be home in eight days." Around the same time in Elizabethan England, women were reportedly tucking peeled apples into their armpits, dancing until the apple was thoroughly sweat-soaked, and handing it to a suitor to eat. It was called a "love apple." (Historians can't fully source this one, for what it's worth, but it's been repeated by anthropologists like Helen Fisher and Desmond Morris for decades.)

So: do certain scents actually turn people on, or have we all just been making this up since the 1500s? The science has been slower to catch up than you'd hope, and honestly, it's still catching up. But we went digging through the research on smell and sexual attraction and found some genuinely fascinating stuff, plus a couple of studies that are more fun than they are rigorous.

Here's what we found, ranked roughly from most to least trustworthy.

1. The Sweaty T-Shirt Study: Can Women Smell Immune System Genes?

In 1995, Swiss researcher Claus Wedekind ran what is probably the most-cited experiment in this entire field. He had men sleep in the same cotton t-shirt for two nights, with strict rules: no deodorant, no cologne, no spicy food, no sex. Then he put each shirt in a box with a small hole in it and had women sniff and rate them.

What he was actually testing was MHC, a cluster of immune system genes. The theory: the more different your MHC is from your partner's, the broader the immune coverage your future kid inherits. And on average, the women rated the shirts of men with the most MHC-dissimilar genes as the most pleasant and sexiest smelling.

Not the hottest guys. Not the cleanest guys. The ones whose immune systems would complement theirs best.

The honest caveat: this research is famous, plausible, and not settled. Follow-up studies have produced conflicting results, and no one has cleanly replicated the findings since the late 90s. Fascinating? Absolutely. Proven? Not quite.

2. Does Birth Control Change Who You're Attracted To?

Here's the twist inside that same t-shirt study that gets far less attention.

The women who were on hormonal birth control showed the reversed preference. They leaned toward men with MHC-similar genes instead. The exact opposite result.

Wedekind speculated that the pill mimics a pregnancy hormone state, and a body that thinks it's already pregnant may prefer the scent of kin over the scent of a genetically novel mate. It's not out shopping for genes anymore. It wants family.

A 2008 follow-up published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B tested this more rigorously, tracking the same women before and after they started taking the pill, and saw a similar shift.

Which raises a question we have not stopped chewing on: could going on or off hormonal birth control quietly change who you're drawn to? The research is suggestive, not conclusive. But it's a hell of a thing to sit with.

3. Do Men Notice Ovulation by Smell?

This one's new. In July 2025, a team at the University of Tokyo led by Professor Kazushige Touhara published findings in iScience identifying three specific compounds in women's body odor that increase during ovulation.

When men were exposed to armpit odor containing those compounds, they rated the smell as more pleasant. They also rated faces shown alongside it as more attractive and more feminine. And here's the part we love: the men's stress levels measurably dropped, tracked through salivary amylase, an actual biological stress marker.

Worth noting the researchers are careful about this. They explicitly say it is not evidence of human pheromones. It's a real chemical signal with a measurable effect, but the pheromone question stays open.

4. What Happens to Your Sex Drive If You Lose Your Sense of Smell?

This is the strongest evidence in the whole pile that smell isn't just a nice-to-have.

A 2019 study in Physiology & Behavior compared 100 patients with olfactory disorders to 51 healthy controls and found that people who lost their sense of smell reported meaningfully decreased sexual desire afterward. One patient's description stuck with us: they missed the scent of their partner, his fragrance and his body odor.

A related reanalysis found the effect splits by gender in an interesting way. Men born without a sense of smell reported a strongly reduced number of sexual relationships, while women reported reduced partnership security.

Post-2020, this research hits differently. A lot of people found out the hard way what it's like to lose this sense.

5. Does a Better Sense of Smell Mean More Orgasms?

Our favorite finding, for reasons that are probably obvious.

Bendas, Hummel, and Croy published this in Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2018. They tested 70 healthy adults using "Sniffin' Sticks," a standardized odor threshold test where you identify which of three pens has been dipped in a diluted chemical. Then they surveyed everyone on desire, performance, and experience.

Odor sensitivity showed no relationship to sexual desire or how often people had sex. But it correlated clearly with experience. People with keener noses rated their sexual activities as more pleasant. And among women specifically, those with the least sensitive noses reported reaching orgasm around 17% of the time, while those with the sharpest noses reported around 60%.

The researchers' theory is that perceiving body odors like sweat, vaginal fluid, and semen enriches the experience by boosting arousal.

The caveat: this is correlational, so a sharper nose doesn't necessarily cause more orgasms. The researchers also note they didn't control for where women were in their menstrual cycle, which affects smell sensitivity. Still, it's a genuinely intriguing thread, and one that makes us wonder what we'd see looking at scent alongside actual orgasm data.

6. Do Aphrodisiac Scents Like Pumpkin Pie Actually Work?

You have absolutely seen this one in a Valentine's Day listicle.

Dr. Alan Hirsch of Chicago's Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation measured blood flow to participants' genitals while they sniffed various scents. The reported winner for men: lavender and pumpkin pie, with a 40% increase in penile blood flow. For women, the top combo was Good & Plenty licorice and cucumber.

Some scents went the other direction. Cherry reportedly decreased vaginal blood flow, as did charcoal barbecue smoke.

Okay, here's the thing. We wanted this to be real. It isn't really holding up. The sample was tiny, around 31 men. When a University of Pennsylvania linguist went looking for the published papers, several couldn't be located in the journals they were attributed to, or in PubMed, or in Google Scholar. Hirsch himself has said the results may reflect personal memory associations rather than any universal physiological response. And the same researcher has also studied how jasmine affects bowling scores and how garlic bread affects family dinner conversations.

Also, skeptics point out something simple: any strong odor increases blood flow to the extremities, and the penis is, technically, an extremity.

We're including it because it's genuinely funny and because you'll see it cited everywhere every February. Now you know what's behind it.

So What Scents Actually Turn People On?

Here's our honest read after going through all of it.

The "one weird scent that will drive them wild" genre is mostly nonsense. There is no universal aphrodisiac smell, and anyone selling you one is selling you something.

But the broader idea, that scent is doing real work in your sex life, holds up much better than we expected. People who lose their sense of smell lose something real. People with sharper noses report better sex. And the smell that matters most isn't a candle or a perfume. It's your partner's actual skin, at the end of an actual day.

Which is maybe the least marketable finding in all of sexual wellness, and also the most romantic.

At Lioness, we're big believers that the more you know about how your body actually works, the better your pleasure gets. That's the whole reason we built a vibrator that shows you your own orgasm data instead of just telling you what should feel good. If reading about other people's research made you curious about your own patterns, that's kind of the entire point.

Frequently Asked Questions About Scent and Attraction

Are human pheromones real?

Scientifically, this is still an open question. Researchers have identified specific body odor compounds that produce measurable effects on human behavior and physiology, but the team behind the 2025 University of Tokyo ovulation study explicitly declined to call their compounds pheromones. Real chemical signaling: yes. Confirmed human pheromones in the way the internet uses the word: not yet.

Can you really smell genetic compatibility?

The 1995 sweaty t-shirt study suggested women prefer the scent of men whose immune system genes differ from their own, which would theoretically produce offspring with broader immune coverage. It's one of the most cited findings in the field. It's also one of the least consistently replicated, so treat it as a compelling hypothesis rather than an established fact.

Does hormonal birth control affect attraction?

Some research suggests it might. In the original t-shirt study, women on the pill preferred the opposite scent profile from women who weren't, and a 2008 follow-up tracking the same women before and after starting the pill found a similar shift. The effect is plausible and has been studied repeatedly, but the overall evidence remains mixed.

What is the sweaty t-shirt study?

A 1995 experiment by Swiss researcher Claus Wedekind in which men slept in cotton t-shirts for two nights without deodorant, cologne, spicy food, or sex. Women then sniffed the shirts and rated them for pleasantness and sexiness. The result: women generally preferred the scent of men whose MHC immune genes were most different from their own.

Why do I like the way my partner smells?

Probably a mix of biology and association. Research shows that perceiving a partner's body odor is linked to greater sexual pleasure, and people who lose their sense of smell often report missing their partner's scent specifically. Some of it may be chemical signaling. A lot of it is simply that your brain has connected that particular smell to someone you want.