Women can tell if they’re going to be friends by someone’s scent

By Stephen Beech

Women can sniff out if they're going to be friends with another woman - simply from their scent, suggests a new study.

Two women meeting for the first time can judge within just four minutes whether they have the potential to be pals - guided as much by smell as any other sense, say American scientists.

The research from Cornell University in New York, on friendship formation, adds to the understanding of the complex picture of what goes on when meeting someone for the first time.

The study of heterosexual women, published in the journal Scientific Reports, found that personal preferences based on a person’s everyday scent - captured on a T-shirt - predicted how much women liked their interaction partners after four-minute “speed-friending” chats.

The face-to-face conversations, in turn, influenced how participants later judged the T-shirt scents alone.

Study co-author Professor Vivian Zayas said: "People take a lot in when they’re meeting face to face.

"But scent, which people are registering at some level, though probably not consciously, forecasts whether you end up liking this person.”

While social olfactory research often focuses on mate selection, the Cornell research team turned their attention to platonic interactions.

And instead of focusing on individuals’ “natural” odour - isolated from products, pets, and other environmental factors - the study leaned into the idea that people actively shape their signature scent through the many choices they make every day, what’s known as their “diplomatic” odour.

Smell-only evaluations paralleled in-person evaluations: If a participant judged someone as having high friend potential based on the smell of a T-shirt, their evaluation of that same person after a four-minute interaction was similarly high.

Evaluations from the live interaction also predicted changes in a second round of diplomatic odour judgments, suggesting that the quality of the in-person interaction influenced how participants perceived the person’s smell.

Zayas said the consistency of judgments across the rating opportunities was "remarkable".

She added, “Everybody showed they had a consistent signature of what they liked.

“And the consistency was not that, in the group, one person smelled really bad and one person smelled really good. No, it was idiosyncratic.

"I might like person A over B over C based on scent, and this pattern predicts who I end up liking in the chat.”