Perfume makers want guys to believe they’ll have more success attracting women if they apply a scent. It turns out that’s probably true, but not for the reason members of either sex would expect.

Craig Roberts and his team from the University of Liverpool showed that that when a man alters his normal body odor by adding fragrance, it positively impacts self-confidence and that creates visual cues women find attractive.

The scientists, working with a research team from Unilever, gave half the male volunteers in their study an unlabelled spray containing a commercial fragrance. The other half received an identically-appearing aerosol that contained no scent at all.

The men knew whether their spray contained a scent because they could smell it, but they didn’t know their behavior was being compared to men in the other cohort.

Psychological testing revealed that self-confidence increased in the group of men that had applied a scent, but not in the fragrantless control group.

Next, the scientists showed women brief, silent videos of men in both groups. The medium removed scent from the equation, yet women found men in the fragrantly-scented group to be more attractive.

Follow-up testing revealed the women were attracted equally to both groups when they were shown still photographs of the men, so something about the men’s posture and movement, and not their physical appearance, was decisive.

Thus when Unilever claims its deodorant Lynx renders men irresistibly attractive it’s hard to argue but the attraction has nothing to do with the smell of the fragrance and everything to do with the confidence-building effect it has on the men wearing it.

The study will be published in the International Journal of Cosmetic Science.

Genetic mutations can cause or prevent disease and scientists at the University of Maryland recently came across an interesting case of the latter.

The scientists asked folks from an Amish community near Lancaster, Pennsylvania to swill down a creamy milkshake and then tracked what happened to fat levels in their blood.

In nearly all participants, triglyceride levels rose for several hours then slowly declined to baseline as would be expected. But in about 5%, the levels started out low and jumped no more than a smidge.

Tori Pollin and colleagues traced the favorable phenotype back to a gene mutation that had already received the inauspicious name apoC-III. The gene codes for APOC3, a protein that normally slows down triglyceride metabolism.

According to Pollin’s report in Science, the cohort with the gene mutation also had higher levels of HDL (good)-cholesterol and lower levels of LDL (bad) –cholesterol. And they had fewer coronary artery calcifications on CT scanning. In short, the mutation was cardio-protective.

The isolated nature of the Amish population enabled the scientists to trace the apoC-III mutation to a man born more than 200 years ago.

In commenting on the study, Daniel Rader told the New York Times, “this is among the strongest human evidence we have that APOC3 is quote, unquote, bad.”

We love it when University of Pennsylvania cardiac researchers talk like that. He added, “if you had a drug to turn off the gene to prevent as much APOC3 being made, this study suggests that that would be beneficial to do.”

We’re on it.