As a student at a big school like Penn State, naturally your going to see a decent amount of students that your attracted too. This is not to say that I or hopefully no one else, specifically walks to class just to look for hunky dudes, but I can’t help but notice them. My question for this blog post came up while I was sitting at dinner with some of my friends and we were all noticing different guys we were attracted to, so what is the science behind physical attraction?

Obviously there are certain factors that go into whether or not you’re attracted to someone, such as physical appearance and personality traits but it goes a lot deeper than that. The first thing you notice about someone is their scent, as I found in an article, you can sense someone’s pheromones. A pheromone is a chemical that is secreted through sweat and other bodily fluids. In another article I found it stated that, “One’s nose can also help identify a genetically compatible mate.” Although there isn’t a specific pheromone that scientists have found that links pheromones to sexual attraction, but there is a high correlation between the scent found in sweat and attraction. An experiment that was performed was one where women were given a sweaty man’s t-shirt to sniff and then proceeded to describe the scent in regard to it’s sexiness, intensity and pleasantness. The experiment concluded that women enjoyed the scent of a man’s t-shirt who’s MHC genes were most different from their own. MHC genes control immunology and when a male and female produce an offspring the couple with most different MHC genes can have a child with a stronger immunity.

Similar to the female’s response in the t-shirt experiment, men can detect when women are fertile, thus making them more attractive. In an experiment conducted at the University of Texas Austin as described in this article, women were instructed to wear a t-shirt for an evening during their peak fertility point during their menstrual cycle, and then wear another t-shirt during their least infertile point. Men detected the “fertile” shirts as pleasing and sexy. The men most likely smelled pheromones thus being more attracted to the t-shirt smell.

Who knew natural musk had so much to do with attraction?

The color females wear can impact if a male is attracted to them more. In various experiments it was proven that red makes women more attractive and sexually desirable to men, although this does not impact women’s attractiveness to other women. On the latter, there is also evidence that women are more attracted to men in red. Red gives the appearance that a man is more powerful.

There is also the concept that during the most fertile point in a women’s menstrual cycle they’re more attracted to a masculine type of man. The idea behind this is that “men who are more masculine would have produced fitter offspring in the ancestral period when reproductive hormones first evolved.”

Who would’ve thought there was so much science behind physical and sexual attraction?