The Beauty Of Body Odour - How to pull with your pits (968 hits)
Category: Science & EnvironmentalRating: 1.23 on 13 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by matnotharry <mattreallysmells.at.hotmail.com> (View user info) at 2008-01-08 12:28:50 EST
At the end of October I attended a Student Windsurf Festival in Bude, Cornwall. The event was small, only 500 students or so, but it was a festival none the less - booze, mud and questionable hygiene all featured heavily.
It was the latter aspect that caught my attention as we sat down for a meal on the journey back to campus. Whilst musing over a menu I absent-mindedly succumbed to an old and frankly embarrassing habit and began to ...twirl my hair.
After a minute or so I realised that not only was the waitress looking at me with a notepad and faintly disguised impatience but also that my hair had not been washed since the previous Tuesday and was duly covered in a fine layer of grease.
Once the waitress was safely out of sight I told a fellow windsurfer, who shall remain anonymous, about my barnet neglect (I am king of conversation) only to be simultaneously shot down and mildly taken aback with his reply of "Actually I haven't washed mine sine June". I couldn't help being slightly impressed with this (my record is six weeks) and shamelessly asked to touch his hair to see if the rumours of hair cleaning itself were true. There was just enough time for me to establish and curiously remark that my hair was somewhat greasier than said windsurfer's before I realised the waitress had returned with a tray of drinks and an expression of faintly disguised nausea.
She needn't have looked so ill. Though no actual scientific study has gone into the theory, it does appear hair is self cleaning - but only after several weeks of a socially unacceptable mop adorning your head. The initial greasiness is caused by your hair containing a large amount of Sebum - a naturally occurring molecule similar to a fat (a lipid). Sebum is partly responsible for keeping your hair (and skin) waterproof - a deficit of the stuff, caused perhaps by over-washing or having very frizzy locks (it is relatively hard for the oil to travel down curly strands, hence curly hair is often dry) , will cause dry, brittle follicles. Too much sebum, however, and soon you will experience the indescribable bad hair smell as bacteria breaks down the oil. N.B. - Sebum is similar to sweat in this instance in that both substances are odourless when produced but are broken down by bacteria that live on your body. Thus it is not you that smells so bad shortly after a gym session but the bacteria in your armpits who will be in the middle of a microbiological orgy - though I often find this is little consolation.
According to many first hand accounts (read: Google searches) it appears everyone knows someone whose neighbour's crazy aunt never washes her hair and it looks great, despite living with all those cats. As well as saving money, skipping shampoo also avoids putting a truckload of chemicals in close proximity to your scalp, quite a bonus if you take a moment to read the ingredient list then several more moments to investigate just what these chemicals are (my tutorial was completely ignored this week) - many are highly irritant, allergens and definitely not made from coconut oil. A friend of mine recently placed some hair in a small pool of shampoo (he is a curious fellow) and returned a few ours later to find it had completely disintegrated. I'm not sure what the moral of the story is here but it is an interesting story all the same.
On the flipside however there is an equal number of people who claim self cleaning hair is rubbish and that attempting to achieve it is downright disgusting. Essentially the scalp is just an extension of the face and I can't imagine many people opting to not wash their mug for six months. Either way there is clearly there is room for more research in this area - though I suggest budding follicle frontiers warn their friends before embarking on any sort of hygiene lapse.
Interestingly it appears the choice to forgo the shampoo, or indeed, washing at all, has little effect on your chances of getting laid. An experiment carried out over a decade ago concluded that the gene MHC* plays a significant role in sexual selection. Claus Wedekind, a Swiss biologist, gave a few carefully selected lads a shirt each to live in for 72 hours without washing, deodorising or any other sissy hygienic nonsense. The shirts were returned, placed into shoeboxes and present to a panel of women for a smell-test (the idea of this still makes me laugh). The results showed the ladies preferred the aroma of a man with a different variety of MHC gene than her.
*(major histocompatibility complex in case you're interested)
A possible evolutionary reason behind this is that it would be genetically beneficial to produce offspring with someone who possessed a variation of MHC - the gene is involved with the immune system and variety would give your sprog a better chance of surviving an illness. Being attracted to an aromatically diverse person would also reduce the chance of inbreeding, which is always a plus.
I should warn you that the idea of using your snout to sniff out your perfect partner should be taken with a pinch of salt. The second part of Wedekind's experiment entailed asking over seventy women to choose the most attractive man from a set of six pictures - three of whom had a comparable MHC gene to the test subject, and three with dissimilar. In contrast to the smell test, the lasses opted overwhelmingly for fellers with the similar DNA.
So it looks like you can not just rely on your natural aroma to entice the opposite sex (though it appears many are trying), being eye-catching tends to be the dominating factor. Shocking stuff. To be quite honest even my sweat was 100% proven to bring a certain percentage of the female population to their knees (in non-repulsed sense) I still don't think I could chance a nightclub without the standard light coating of Deo. No I'm just going have to rely on my looks - ladies, form an orderly line.
User Reviews
Submitted by orphelia (user info) at 2008-02-04 07:08:36 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
I read this when you posted but I didn't rate as too many ratings and the front page is filled with 'orphelia'.
Should that happen, Uber would find out what a dull existence I lead :(
Submitted by woolfe (user info) at 2008-01-10 04:41:18 EST (#)
Ranking: -2
No Comment
Submitted by Falafel (user info) at 2008-01-09 00:50:36 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
My hair happens to look like shit for no less than 15 hours after I wash it. Pity.
Submitted by SanDee (user info) at 2008-01-08 19:14:04 EST (#)
Ranking: 1
I like a man to smell like a real man (as long as it aint shit, vomit or the smell of another woman)
Submitted by Wildman (user info) at 2008-01-08 16:37:56 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
i like hairy smelly pits, especially on small-breasted women
that way, when my junk slides off, i can at least pretend that i'm getting something done
Submitted by monkeyswithguns (user info) at 2008-01-08 16:34:06 EST (#)
Ranking: 1
Ideally, one should wash their hair every 3 days or so, which is just before it gets smelly, and just after it gets awesome.
Submitted by i_can_get_you_a_toe (user info) at 2008-01-08 15:10:06 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
I still have to say that if a guy smells nice - no matter what he looks like, i'm instantly attracted.......unless he's fat.
Submitted by Istaros (user info) at 2008-01-08 14:02:59 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
couldn't you have posted this somewhere where it would have changed -not merely reinforced- the behavior of the people reading it?
Submitted by skrapmetal (user info) at 2008-01-08 13:47:43 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by BLITZKREIG_BOB (user info) at 2008-01-08 12:34:23 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Was this written by the metal legend Ronnie James B.O.?
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Nope. Barack Obama.
Submitted by Crystle (user info) at 2008-01-08 12:59:10 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
you should totally test out the hair-self-cleaning theory and give us weekly updates.
some of us have jobs so we can't try it.
Submitted by Brdn_Nkd (user info) at 2008-01-08 12:43:22 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
interesting
Submitted by BLITZKREIG_BOB (user info) at 2008-01-08 12:34:23 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Was this written by the metal legend Ronnie James B.O.?
Submitted by Shlongy (user info) at 2008-01-08 12:32:50 EST (#)
Ranking: -2
Is this about a Non-Alcoholic beer?