Do you smell your age?

Most of us have heard the terms “young and fresh” and “old and stale”.
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But clearly these old adages do not apply when it comes to body scent. 
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A new study shows that you don’t have to be young to smell good. 
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In fact, it turns out the elderly have a less intense body odour than younger people do.
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A study, published in the journal PLoS One, looks at humans’ ability to judge age based on smell alone. 
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Forty-one volunteers between the ages of 20 and 95 spent 5 nights sleeping in T-shirts with nursing pads sewn into the armpits. 
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Before bed they all showered with odour free soap and laundered their linens in odour free detergent. 
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Once the 5 nights were over, researchers took the pads out of the shirts and put them in individual jars. 
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Another group of volunteers then went to work assessing the odours by smelling the inside of the jars. 
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They had to rate them in terms of intensity and pleasantness or unpleasantness. 
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The surprising results…the 75-95 year olds were judged to be less intense and more pleasant than the young and middle aged jars. 
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The most unpleasant came from the 45 to 55 year-old men’s jars.
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What Smell Has To Do With Your Health?
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The authors of the study say the results seem to support the long standing concept of “old people odour”; the notion that old people have a certain smell. 
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What is surprising though is that this common smell is not nearly as repugnant as people normally describe. 
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The researchers suggest that the thought that old people smell bad has more to do with a “negative perception” towards old age.
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Rather than a true reflection of the odour.
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The report published in PLoS One doesn’t mean that all elderly people come up smelling like roses.  
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According to the Social Issues Research Centre, everyone has a certain preference in terms of odour.
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So what smells good to one person may not smell all that great to another. 
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They also point out that sense of smell can be impacted by ones health. 
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If you have damage that is classified as physical or mental it can impair your ability to smell properly. 
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If you were for instance a judge in this latest study and suffered from migraines, depression or anorexia, studies show that your ability to smell accurately could be skewed. 
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Like damage to taste buds, damage to our sense of smell can be very mild.
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So how is it that we smell in the first place? 
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The simple way to explain it is that body odour is due to an interaction between skin gland secretions and bacteria on our skin. 
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As we age, the activities of our skin glands change so this could account for the change in the way we smell.
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What Your Genes Have To Do With Your Smell
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Some research points to our genes as a deciding factor in what odours we prefer. 
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Some studies have even shown that women can identify men based on single genes. 
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In smell tests they showed a preference for odours from men who shared genes inherited from their fathers.
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And a dislike for odours from men who had the same genes as their mothers.
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No matter how we smell or why we smell the way we do, the findings reported in PLoS One have made for interesting water cooler conversation. 
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A number of media outlets have picked up on the story and scientists believe this will fuel further research into the area of sense of smell.
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Smell helps us in so many ways that we are not conscious of.
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Time to learn what they are!