Smelly friendship

Body odor is a turnoff.

When British tennis player Harriet Dart played against Lois Boisson of France in the first round of the clay-court Rouen Open in Melbourne, Australia on 15 April, she could not help but complain to the umpire during a changeover.

“Can you tell her (Boisson) to wear deodorant? … Because she smells really bad,” Dart was heard telling the umpire, CNN reports.

The remark was picked up by a microphone and it spread on social media.

Dart, who lost 6-0, 6-3, later apologized to Lois through her Instagram. “It was a heat-of-the-moment comment that I truly regret,” said Dart, according to CNN.

Unless Boisson uses deodorant, Dart likely won’t get along with her. That seems normal based on a study on friendship by scent conducted by researchers in Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

A woman can be friends with another woman she hasn’t met based on the scent of the latter, according to Vivian Zayas, professor of psychology at Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences.

Zayas’ findings are contained in the article titled, “The Interactive Role of Odor Associations in Friendship Preferences,” published on 2 April in Nature Scientific Reports.

The findings were the results of an experiment that involved heterosexual women who were given T-shirts to wear for about 12 hours, going about their usual activities.

The T-shirts were then handed over to other women in the experiment who sniffed the worn shirts, then marked down whether they would like to hang out with the person who had worn the tee and become friends with them, or avoid them, Cornell Chronicle reports.

The researchers observed that “if a participant judged high friend potential based on the smell of a T-shirt, their evaluation of the same person after a four-minute interaction was the same,” according to CC.

Zayas said the study found that a person’s everyday, natural scent is a strong predictor of whether others might want to interact with them.