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We all know that dogs like to sniff each other — often in “delicate” parts of their body. We also know that many other animals have very good sense of smells. But in our daily lives, apart from food, our sense of smell seems to play a subordinate role.
However, this fascinating piece of research out of the Weizman Institute of Science says something else. Namely that our friends smell like us and that we likely choose our friends based on their smell!
This may sound far-fetched at first glance but we do already know that we use our sense of smell more than we think. We are actually often constantly smelling ourselves but often in unconscious ways. This could be through wiping our faces with our hands, a sneaky smell under our armpit, but also after shaking hands we often automatically and unconsciously rub this against our nose. The remnants of an automated smell reflex.
The question then remains do we choose our friends, or alternatively our romantic partners, based on smell? This is a question that Inbal Ravreby set out to answer.
First, she founds sets of so-called “click” friends. These are friends who click on first meeting and don’t need a lot of time to become familiar with each other. Ravreby hypothesised that this was down in part to a sense of smell in absence of…
