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In a battle between nature and culture , culture has won by a hair — or lack thereof .
That ’s the determination of a group of scientists in the Czech Republic . In a new field of study , they had male participants shave one armpit and let the other grow waste ; they then collect odor samples from each of the men ’s pit and buy the farm them under the noses of a group of females , who then rate how attractive they found each odor . As it turned out , the women preferred the smell of the shave pits , but just barely .
" Altogether , the consequence of shaving is not quite large , " said lead researcher Jan Havlicek , an anthropologist at Charles University in Prague who specialize inthe function of odor in human drawing card .
The effect of shave was " transient , " Havlicek say . The study ’s female player detect the smell of fresh shaved pits more pleasant than pits that had been growing hair for six to 10 week , but they could not distinguish between the smell of armpits that had one calendar week of growth and those that had six to 10 weeks of growth . Any hair , whether short and prickly or long and waxen , smelled about the same . " This is kind of surprising because when you await at armpit pilus after one workweek , it is only a couple of millimeters long , so that was an unexpected result , " Havlicek told Life ’s Little Mysteries , a sister site to LiveScience .
Most interesting of all is that females have a slight preference for shave armpits over hairy ace , despite the grounds that strongly suggests hairy pits specifically develop to make people smell out more attractive . [ Why Do You Stink ? ]
scientist think human armpit whisker — longer than that of any other apes — develop to retain chemicals that are produced extravagantly by armpit secretory organ , so as to deepen people ’s innate body odor and increase the chance that others will sense it , and like it . It is , thus , counterintuitive that women have now come to favour the less intense olfaction of hairless underarms .
" It ’s because ofcultural beliefs . It is to some extent sovereign of evolutionary processes and these things which develop for a much longer clock time , " Havlicek said . " And also this is more related to to ocular images of shaven and unshaven axillary fossa and how we construct ravisher in our ethnical setting . "
He noted that the result would probably have been very different had he conducted his field in another time or berth . " have ’s say if you had operate it 30 years ago in a finish where grazing is not usual , you might expect different results . "
Conversely , because there is a much stronger ethnic pressure on fair sex to knock off their armpits than there is on men , had the researcher ready up the bailiwick in reverse , it is likely that the results would have been more rich in favor of the smell of bare female pits than they were in party favour of bare male pit . However , it might be unmanageable to obtain out .
" We definitely want to do [ the reverse bailiwick ] but the matter is that it could be kind of technically challenging , " Havlicek pronounce . " Not many ladies might be unforced not to shave one of the armpits for two month . With men , it was easier to get participants . "
The report was published online Dec. 29 in the peer - reviewed journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology .
