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Study Suggests ‘Old People Smell’
Is Actually A Sweeter Aroma
By Grace Wiltbank
Contributing Writer
We old folks never tire of mourning about what makes us different from the young and the beautiful — wrinkles, grey hair, bum knees, bad backs, aching feet and addled brains.
However, we can take consolation in the fact that when it comes to body odor, we smell better than our juniors. That’s the finding reached by a group of scientists who wanted to know if, as people have claimed down through the centuries, that old people have a distinctive body odor — the “old people smell.”
The study concluded that indeed that there is a distinctive “old people smell” but that it’s a better smell than that exuded by the young and middle aged.
The report put it this way: “Tests demonstrated that body odors from old age donors were rated as significantly less unpleasant than body odors originating from both middle aged and young donors.”
The researchers — from Swarthmore (PA) College, the University of Pennsylvania, the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia and Karolinska Institute in Sweden — reached their happy finding by comparing body odors from volunteers representing three different age groups — the young (20-30 years), the middle aged (45-55 years) and the old aged (75-95 years).
You are undoubtedly wondering at this point how this curious research project was conducted. Did the researchers line up people and simply sniff their armpits? Thankfully, nothing so crude.
Body odors were collected from donors’ armpits using ultra-thin nursing pads sewn into T shirts that had been washed with an odorless detergent before use. The T shirts, which the donors wore while they slept at night, served to hold the pads in place and protect them from outside contamination. During the day, donors stored the T shirts in sealed, odorless bags to protect them from outside contamination. When the researchers determined that a pad had soaked up a sufficient amount of arm pit secretion, that pad was then submitted to the smell test.
Now that you know how the tests were done, you’re undoubtedly asking why they were done. At a time when a scientists still haven’t found a cure for cancer or Alzheimer’s Disease, why are some of them spending precious time and money determing just which age groups have the best smelling armpits?
The researchers insist they weren’t wasting time and money on a silly project.
Their report said: “Body odor’s chemical complexity enables it to convey a plethora of biological and social information. In human and non-human animals alike, signals hidden within the body odor cocktail have been suggested to aid in mate selection, individual recognition, kin detection, and sex-differentiation, to name a few.”
At the very least, the study allows me to tell gorgeous 20-somethings: “You may look a heck of a lot better than I do, but at least I smell better than you.”
Is Actually A Sweeter Aroma
By Grace Wiltbank
Contributing Writer
We old folks never tire of mourning about what makes us different from the young and the beautiful — wrinkles, grey hair, bum knees, bad backs, aching feet and addled brains.
However, we can take consolation in the fact that when it comes to body odor, we smell better than our juniors. That’s the finding reached by a group of scientists who wanted to know if, as people have claimed down through the centuries, that old people have a distinctive body odor — the “old people smell.”
The study concluded that indeed that there is a distinctive “old people smell” but that it’s a better smell than that exuded by the young and middle aged.
The report put it this way: “Tests demonstrated that body odors from old age donors were rated as significantly less unpleasant than body odors originating from both middle aged and young donors.”
The researchers — from Swarthmore (PA) College, the University of Pennsylvania, the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia and Karolinska Institute in Sweden — reached their happy finding by comparing body odors from volunteers representing three different age groups — the young (20-30 years), the middle aged (45-55 years) and the old aged (75-95 years).
You are undoubtedly wondering at this point how this curious research project was conducted. Did the researchers line up people and simply sniff their armpits? Thankfully, nothing so crude.
Body odors were collected from donors’ armpits using ultra-thin nursing pads sewn into T shirts that had been washed with an odorless detergent before use. The T shirts, which the donors wore while they slept at night, served to hold the pads in place and protect them from outside contamination. During the day, donors stored the T shirts in sealed, odorless bags to protect them from outside contamination. When the researchers determined that a pad had soaked up a sufficient amount of arm pit secretion, that pad was then submitted to the smell test.
Now that you know how the tests were done, you’re undoubtedly asking why they were done. At a time when a scientists still haven’t found a cure for cancer or Alzheimer’s Disease, why are some of them spending precious time and money determing just which age groups have the best smelling armpits?
The researchers insist they weren’t wasting time and money on a silly project.
Their report said: “Body odor’s chemical complexity enables it to convey a plethora of biological and social information. In human and non-human animals alike, signals hidden within the body odor cocktail have been suggested to aid in mate selection, individual recognition, kin detection, and sex-differentiation, to name a few.”
At the very least, the study allows me to tell gorgeous 20-somethings: “You may look a heck of a lot better than I do, but at least I smell better than you.”