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Smell Dating is the first mail-order smell dating service, but its creators aren’t the only ones wagering that we’re better at choosing partners through our noses than our eyes. By sniffing other people’s body odor instead of swiping right on their photos, the thinking goes, we rely on primal bodily intuition.
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Animals secrete pheromones, a distinct cocktail of chemicals that…have the power to influence how those animals respond to one another…In these animals, genes in the major histocompatibility complex (MHC)—part of the immune system—produce unique odors; when another animal gets a whiff, they’re either attracted or repelled based on immune compatibility.
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Researchers agree that our sense of smell is important to human relationships, and that we are hard-wired to be drawn to people whose scent we like[.] But the idea that humans emit invisible chemicals that could drive us to a partner is hardly the consensus today.
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“The underlying theory is that you somehow select immune compatibility in a mate,” says Noam Sobel, [a] professor of neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute of Science[.]
Read full, original post: Love In the Stenches
