Science Can Tell if You're a Woman—From How Your Hand Smells

Science can tell if you're a man or a woman just from how your hand smells, researchers have found. The findings are in a study from Florida International University, published July 5 in the online journal PLOS One. Scientists analyzed scent compounds on 60 individuals in their research. Half of the participants were female, the other half were male. They then assessed the scent compounds on each palm to see if they could use it to determine each person's sex. They guessed correctly at a rate of 96.67 percent. The analytical technique they used to obtain these findings is known as mass spectrometry, which presents results based on the ratio of ions. Scientists already knew that people can be tracked based on their odor, which is why criminal investigations often use dogs' heightened sense of smell to track down people. However, human scent profiles have not been examined thoroughly until now. "We expected to see differences in females and males but did not expect to attain such a high degree of accuracy, exceeding 96 percent," study co-author Kenneth Furton of Florida International University told Newsweek. "For comparison, canines have been demonstrated to match the scent of individuals with a greater than 75 percent accuracy."

"This approach to analyzing hand odor volatiles can be applied when other discriminatory evidence such as DNA is lacking and allow for differentiation or class characterization such as sex, race and age," the study's authors said in a joint statement. This research could help with criminal investigations in the future, a press release on the findings said, because hands can leave behind valuable scents at a crime scene. Crimes such as assault, robberies and rape, for example, can be linked based on a person's hands. Using this technique, authorities may be able to track down perpetrators and predict their sex. In addition, the scent compounds in a palm can help identify a person's racial or ethnic group, providing further information on the perpetrator's identity. With further research in this area, the chemical and statistical analyses presented in the paper "could be used to uncover many details about a potential perpetrator solely through their hand scent profiles," the press release on the findings said. "Human scent can linger for days and can be stored for years and still be analyzed and matched to individuals," Furton said. He continued: "We did not study the accuracy of gender classification with aged samples in this study, but previous work in matching human scent on objects to individuals demonstrated that human scent is actually very robust. In [a] paper from 2010, we demonstrated in a double-blind study that even...human scent can be matched by canines with over 82 percent accuracy." This is not the first time scientists have discovered how important smell is to humans. Research released in 2014 showed that humans make subconscious decisions based on a person's smell, NBC reported.

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The study from the Chinese Academy of Sciences found that when people smell chemicals produced by members of the opposite sex, they made assumptions about the person and judged certain movements as being more masculine or feminine. This study supported theories about human sex pheromones—chemicals produced by the body that attract others and influence social behavior. Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about this study? Let us know via science@newsweek.com.