Oxytocin is the brain’s love hormone—without it, we might not ever fall in love or attempt monogamy. We know that the hormone releases “happy” feelings during events from nursing to orgasm, and is the reason why people feel a chemical “bond” with a partner. And now, scientists have found that the hormone can also boost the sex appeal of complete strangers.
A University of Bristol study tested 96 men and women in a double-blind test by spraying them with either oxytocin or a plecebo. The subjects were then asked to rate pictures of 48 men and women for attractiveness, and 30 for trustworthiness. Sure enough, the participants that had sniffed the love hormone tended to rate the random people in the pictures as better looking or more trustworthy.
Psychologist Angeliki Theodoriduou, who led the study, found that regardless of their gender or mood, the people under the influence of oxytocin were more likely to like the strangers in the pictures.
While the researchers didn’t look at why oxytocin has such pull, they reckon the hormone’s effect on the brain is so strong that it suppresses any fearful emotions people would normally feel.
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Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer is married to the Berlin Wall. Like any couple, they’ve had their ups and downs, but over the years, they’ve been able to meet each other’s spiritual and emotional needs. “We even made it through the terrible disaster of 9 November 1989, when my husband was subjected to frenzied attacks by a mob. But we are still as much in love as the day we met,” Berliner-Mauer said last year.
Berliner-Mauer (the German name for the Berlin Wall, which she has taken as her last name) has since defined her love under the term “objectum sexual,” or OS—in other words, a person who falls in love with inanimate objects. As an animist, she, along with a growing group of others, believe that inanimate objects are sentient, intelligent beings.
Take Erika Eiffel, who is married to the Eiffel Tower. Eiffel says she recalls being attracted to objects even as a child, and realized she was different only when she saw other people at school dating each other, while she was dating a bridge.
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Think he’s just not that into you? Turns out you can figure it out from his smell—more specifically, through the subconscious signals he’s sending out through chemicals in his sweat. The researchers found that a man’s scent is different when he’s sexually aroused than when he’s not—and women can tell the difference.
Psychologist Denise Chen at Rice University asked 20 heterosexual men to refrain from using deodorant and use scent-free shampoo and soap when showering. The men were then asked to watch videos showing “sexual intercourse between heterosexual couples” for 20 minutes. The researchers put pads in the subjects’ armpits to collect their sweat, and hooked the men up to electrodes to measure their sexual excitement. Then the men were asked to collect their sweat while they watched educational documentaries, so the female sniffers could compare.
The researchers then hooked 19 women up to brain scans and asked each of them to smell the pads and describe the sweat as floral, sweaty/human, other, and no smell. The women couldn’t distinguish between sexual sweat and “neutral” sweat, further suggesting that the response to sexual sweat is subconscious. But their brain scans showed something different:
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Millions of Americans can’t smell, and there’s no treatment or cure for it. And if you’re on the pill, you may even have trouble sniffing out a good mate! But new research shows that falling in love can also alter a woman’s sense of smell, suggesting that smell serves as an evolutionary mechanism that reinforces monogamy.
Johan Lundstrom, primary investigator at the Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory at Monell Chemical Senses Center, found that when women are deeply in love, they lose some of their ability to differentiate the smells of their male friends.
To test this theory, Lundstrom took 20 female volunteers and measured how in love they were by having them fill out a questionnaire called the Passionate Love Scale. The women were asked to rate their feelings on a scale of 1 to 9 for questions such as:
I sense my body responding when [BOYFRIEND] touches me.
Sometimes I feel I can’t control my thoughts; they are obsessively on [BOYFRIEND].
I’d get jealous if I thought [BOYFRIEND] was falling in love with someone else.
Lundstrom then gave a T-shirt to each of the women’s boyfriends, one female friend, and one male friend, in order to collect body odor samples.
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