Armpit Sniffing – Uncovering The Magic of Pheromones

Normalize armpit sniffing! Even Napoleon was reported to have enjoyed the essence of his lover. 🧐🇫🇷

Not wanting to lose any of her natural scent before he arrived home, Napoleon famously wrote to his lover, Empress Joséphine, “Don’t wash, I’m coming home”

Some of you may be thinking, “what?” but this is my attempt to normalize something that even I, at one point, thought was a bit to the left of the center. One day, however, I opened up my mind, when I realized I was drifting off to sleep, intoxicated by inhaling the delicate scent, emanating straight from the armpit of my partner. 

Gawd, am I an armpit girl now? Think about it; we’ve been told that we’re supposed to dislike this odor. Perhaps it’s where I have arrived in my sexual biology, or maybe it’s something I’ve never noticed before.

I remember my mother, ever so fearful about smelling any less than godly, would frequently turn her nose up and exclaim, “can you BELIEVE we’re supposed to be attracted to that?!” I always wrote her off, as young ones do. However I didn’t really consider the notion of being attracted to pheromones. Not until becoming more and more frequently exposed to people who love armpits, in various adult online communities. 

The answer is: armpit sniffing is all about pheromones.

This deep desire that sometimes spans into fetish territory, was far more common than I realized. This old but informative TED Talk uncovers a great deal about pheromones and why we respond to them, using dogs as a perfect example as a creature that learns and uncovers through scent.

Maybe it’s not that we’re necessarily supposed to be *attracted* in the same way we’d be attracted to smelling a flower. As with many animals, humans are biologically wired to pick up information, based on scent. The information we “pick up” can tell our brains many things, such as whether or not a person can be a potential mate, biologically. 

Hormones and pheromones are secreted by our apocrine sweatglands, which only reside in our genital-region or underarms. It’s no surprise that, as animals ourselves, we’re able to pick up on these hormones and pheromones which trigger a brain response. If we’re attracted to it, that means there is a level of compatibility. Pheromones and other hormones can tell our brains a lot of things we don’t understand consciously, but understand on a more primal level. Armpit Sniffing is just one way to get that scent, stimulating our brains in unique ways.

Various research studies have shown that people can “sniff out” better mates, that are more genetically dissimilar. This popular study had 49 women bask in the odor of men’s two-day old shirts. The study found that these women strongly preferred those who possessed different gene variants from themselves.

All Genders Enjoy Pheromones!

A similar experiment was performed on straight men. In this study, 41 women were asked to wear cotton gauze in their pits for 24 hours, on two different days. One day was a high fertility day. The second pad was worn on a low-fertility day. The study concluded that men rated the high-fertility days as smelling “sexier” and more pleasant, overall. 

Study author Kelly Gildersleeve suggested, “It could be a learned response that historically encouraged men to have sex with a woman precisely when sex was more likely to result in conception.”

Scent is a way to bond, but it’s also a way to suss out compatibility.

While there is more to uncover, scent and closeness are very much correlated in an intimate situation. Sometimes simply having a strong connection with someone can be enough for us to love their scent, as well.

Beyond the potential genetic connection, this study uncovers how odor and compatibility can be based on a “positive feedback loop”. There is a relationship that exists psychologically between how much a person likes their partner’s B.O. and exposure. 

Pheromones are Communicators, similar to Hormones

Since nowadays we mask underarm odor quite frequently, it’s become a lost art of non-verbal communication. Our bodies run and operate based on hormones, which communicate messages to the brain from various regions of the body. Pheromones are external communicators, stimulating your evolutionary instincts in ways you may or may not be conditioned to appreciate. 

Pheromones aren’t quite like hormones, but they have similar purposes as communicators. Hormones are what our bodies use to communicate needs and carry out processes such as mood and sexual function. Pheromones work outside the body, signaling messages to members of the same species. Much like animals, we’re able to pick up on those easily, through erogenous zones such as the armpit and the groin-area. 

On A Personal Note

Speaking as a woman that dates men, we’re socially conditioned to love a man’s scent from a young age. Even if it’s their cologne, it’s still paired with their personal musk, making it their own personal scent signature. We love this so much, that we love to steal their hoodies and wear them ourselves. 

Let’s call that what it is: basking in your person’s natural scent. So I ask, why not appreciate the armpit for what it is? A pheromone factory. It’s a signal of lust, inspiring a plethora of feelings you may not have allowed yourself to explore.

Enjoying the smell of someone’s body odor feels deeply primal in concept, but perhaps we’re over sanitizing the human body as an image. It’s not like it’s a surprise to anyone that  someone–another human!–can have body odor at all. Perhaps that’s simply because it is something deeply ingrained in our biology, and not something we desperately need to unpack.

Are you into Armpit Sniffing? Let us know your take in the comments about what really turns you on!

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