I was reading a bit about body odor on wiki and this question popped into my head. Obviously as it states in the wiki article some body odors peculiar to a group can be explained by different cultural hygiene and dietary habits while others maybe not so much. The article also had this interesting tidbit:
I will admit I have noticed an odor that seems to be peculiar to black people and other groups like Indians and also the Mexicans I worked with doing construction in Florida (though that could be easily explained by diet.) I don’t know maybe white people have a smell I’ve never noticed since I am white and the Japanese noted one maybe as a result of consuming dairy products. Anyone have any knowledge they can impart on this subject?
As an anecdote, when I lived in New Zealand I had a friend who was half English and half Chinese. When he went to visit his mother’s family in China for the first time in his mid-20s, they all told him he “smelled like a white person.” (This was not a compliment.)
Besides ethnic foods, there’s the possibility that there might be detectable scent differences; I’ve no idea if it’s ever been tested. Given that women can detect whether or not a man is related to them by scent, ( likely by detecting his MHC *, it’s believed ), it might be possible to detect the relatedness of other groupings by scent. This is sheer speculation on my part, however.
Major Histocompatibility Complex; an immune system molecule
NinjaChick, I’ve know three or four fellows (various ages, all Caucasian) who have an appealing sort of pencil-shavings smell to their everyday sweat that is distinct from the scent of most men. I find this smell very attractive, regardless of the age/personality/general romantic suitability of the guy. Anecdotal, yes, but it effectively personalizes the study cited by Der Trihs for me.
More on-topic: last year, scientists isolated a gene that controls whether ear wax is wet (Europeans and Africans) or dry (Asians and Native Americans). This supports Cecil’s 2002 musings (linked in Colibri’s post), since ear wax and armpit odor are correlated and the variants of the ear wax gene are very clearly associated with different populations.
I haven’t noticed PEOPLE having a particular scent, but years ago, when I was a substitute teacher, I found that I could tell as soon as I stepped inside a school lobby for the first time if there were a lot of African-American students, just by the smell.
Not the people, the hair products! When there are a lot of kids in a building using Jeri-Curl, you notice it right away!
In high school anatomy/biology we did an experiment. We were all given t-shirts by our instructor that had been washed in a fragrance free detergent. We were to put these on the next day and wear them for 7 days without washing. We also were to use fragrance free soap, shampoo and lotions. Perfume, hair spray, cologne etc were forbidden. (Stinky! But it was all in the name of science!!) He would walk by us every day and if he detected any fragrance on you then you were out of the experiment.
After the 7th day we put our t-shirts in bags. Only he knew then whose was whose. The goal was to find your own t-shirt and also report the identity of the owners of other shirts if we could.
The results were interesting. I don’t recall the exact breakdown but all of the girls found their own shirt. We were also able to identify the most of the other students. Very few of the boys identified their own and were unable to identify classmates. (A couple of them did but we had to factor in luck)
The funny thing was, I recall how easy it was to find mine. I very quickly identified my lab partner (who was also a close friend of mine) and I was able to easily identify the two partners that sat at a table with my partner and I. The others were more difficult to sort out.
Anecdotally, and based squarely on the “cultural rather than racial” idea, I can walk into the toilets at work, and tell if the person who’s just dropped a bomb in there is Vietnamese or Anglo-Australian. The Vietnamese variety smells worse to me, and my Vietnamese friends say the opposite (and I believe them). A few Lebanese people I know have a rancid sort of body odour. I could never tell why, because they were very clean guys. I put it together when one of them offered me my first coffee with cardamom in it. The coffee was great, but the smell went straight to my pores, and it was that same rancid smell.