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By DAILY MAIL REPORTER Published: 00:46 BST, 22 April 2025 | Updated: 03:18 BST, 22 April 2025
When we first meet someone, we can’t help but make snap judgments.And there are so many characteristics that help us work out if we like them – their body language, how they speak, their fashion choices.But for women, there is another trait that is vital in figuring out if they’ll get on with someone or not – the person’s scent.Women, scientists say, can tell if they’re going to be friends with another woman within just four minutes of meeting them – and they’re guided by smell as much as any other sense.The research on friendship formation from Cornell University, New York, adds to understanding of the complex picture of what goes on when meeting someone for the first time.Choosing to look at platonic interactions rather than romantic ones, the researchers captured the individual scents of heterosexual women on T-shirts.The scientists decided to capture what they called ‘diplomatic’ odour – the scent shaped by someone through the many choices they make every day, instead of capturing ‘natural’ odour – a smell isolated from products, pets, and other environmental factors. Women, scientists from Cornell University, New York, say, can tell if they’re going to be friends with another woman within just four minutes of meeting them – and they’re guided by smell as much as any other senseWomen were then asked to judge each other’s friend potential based on their smell alone, before meeting them in person for a four minute ‘speed-friending’ chat.The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, found that the smell-only evaluations paralleled in-person evaluations: if a participant judged someone as having high friend potential based on smell, their evaluation of that person after four minutes was similarly high.Study co-author Professor Vivian Zayas, from Cornell’s psychology department, said: ‘People take a lot in when they’re meeting face to face. But scent – which people are registering at some level, though probably not consciously – forecasts whether you end up liking this person.’After the women met face-to-face, they were asked to re-evaluate the smells.The results of this stage suggested that the quality of the in-person interactions had an effect on their perception of each other’s smell.Professor Zayas said the consistency of each woman’s judgments of smell was ‘remarkable’.’Everybody showed they had a consistent signature of what they liked,’ she said.’And the consistency was not that, in the group, one person smelled really bad and one person smelled really good – it was idiosyncratic.’
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Scent of a woman: How girls sniff out their new friends…
