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Liz Gabor calls the odor “man sweat.” And though she’s loath to admit it, the aromatic scent makes her feel, as she calls it, a little frisky. “My friends think I’m crazy, but I think male sweat is kind of pleasant and, well, kind of hot,” says Gabor, 28, a customer service rep and happily married mother of two young girls.

Gabor doesn’t have a honker that’s on the fritz. Rather, her penchant for “man sweat” is all in her genes, according to new research from Rockefeller and Duke Universities published this week in the journal Nature. Scientists have previously found an association between male sweat and female arousal, but this study is the first to find a gene that is linked to the ability to smell a specific chemical in the sweat. And that, they say, may be a revolution in the understanding of how our olfactory sense functions.

According to the Rockefeller and Duke researchers, about 70 percent of adult men and women have the genetic capacity to perceive a particular chemical called androstenone in male body odor. To them, the testosterone-laden substance can take on a pleasant bouquet similar to vanilla or other sweet or woodsy scents. Others who have a functional copy of the gene perceive androstenone as less than pleasurable, akin to the aromatic elixir of stale urine. About 30 percent of adult men and women can’t smell androstenone at all, leading researchers to suspect they might be missing the gene responsible for smelling the aroma.

To figure out exactly who could smell the manly-man scent of androstenone, researchers presented 400 participants with 66 different odors, including woodsy scents like pine, strong scents like garlic, and esoteric odors like methanethiol, a man-made scent that is similar to the smell of urine after a person has eaten asparagus.

DNA taken from blood samples was then analyzed, and those individuals who could smell androstenone were found to have genetic variations in a single odorant receptor called OR7D4. Whether they perceived androstenone as pleasant or foul smelling was due to two tiny changes in the gene, called single nucleotide polymorphisms, that made the odorant receptor stop functioning.

For researchers who are trying to unravel the complicated way people perceive certain aromas, finding a genetic link to at least one smell—male body odor—is akin to finding a Rosetta Stone. “There is a mystery as to how the nose works, well beyond the whole realm of male sweat,” says neuroscientist Charles J. Wysocki, Ph.D., a member of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia and one of the world’s leading olfactory science researchers. “Quite frankly, I am jealous of them.”

While being able to smell androstenone may seem like an attribute that you can live without, the chemical may have some broader implications than making us scream “ewwww.” Or in the case of some women, “aaahhh.”

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Male sweat

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