 What do you smell like? Do you know? Go ahead, smell your armpits. While we may just catch a whiff of our smelly armpits after a long workout and think nothing much of it. Besides, dang, I'm stinky. There may actually be something else going on. According to research, our body odor can surprisingly reveal a few interesting things about us. We know what you're thinking. Really? How? But there's some pretty fascinating studies, some published by renowned researchers on what exactly our scent may say about us, even if we're unaware initially what those things are. So we're about to break down some scent studies for you. Here are a few of the things our body odor reveals about us. 1. If you're attracted to someone, do you have a crush? Are you hoping they're just as attracted to you as you are to them? Well, you may want to pile on the fragrance. Or not. Swiss biological researcher Klaus Swedekind is known for his famous 1995 sweaty t-shirt study. In the study, researchers had 44 men wear a clean cotton t-shirt for two nights when they slept. The men were told to keep the t-shirts in an open plastic bag when they weren't wearing it. They were also given odor-free deodorants and told not to eat any spicy foods or participate in any activities that could affect the smell of their t-shirt. The day after the male participants two nights in these cotton t-shirts, the researchers then placed the shirts in identical boxes and had 49 women smell each box one at a time. T-shirts were separated into boxes based off the MHC jeans. Three shirts that were similar MHC jeans in a box and three shirts from males with dissimilar MHC jeans. Where possible, women smelled the shirts during the second week of their menstrual cycle. So what did the researchers find? Women who weren't on oral contraceptives preferred the men with MHC jeans different from theirs. This was after they rated the sense based on their pleasantness, intensity, and sexiness. The study even states that the odors of MHC dissimilar men remind the test women more often of their own actual or former mates than do the odors of MHC similar men. So did your crush turn you down? It could just be due to your dissimilar MHC jeans my friend. Too bad. Or they just weren't feeling it. Nah, it's probably your armpits. Number two. If you're ill, did you know that your scent can reveal if you're sick? A study published in European neurology found that a dog trained to recognize the smell of prostate cancer could identify 30 out of 33 prostate cancer patients correctly based on the smell of their urine samples. Time to train Buster. Open the toilet seat. But what about t-shirt smells again? Well, in another study, researchers injected subjects with a compound that would mess with their immune system, making it seem as if they were sick. The researchers then had other participants while their t-shirts. And you guessed it, the participants could identify which people were more likely sick. Number three. If you're extroverted, neurotic, or dominant, are you extroverted, dominant, neurotic, unsure? Time to smell your armpits. A 2012 study published in the European Journal of Personality found that people who were neurotic or dominant could be identified by their scent. How did they collect these scent samples, you may ask? You guessed it. Cotton t-shirts. A classic. 30 male and 30 female subjects wore a cotton t-shirt for three days straight. Then 100 males and 100 females rated the t-shirt scent. The ratings were then compared to a self-assessed personality test the t-shirt wearing subjects took before. There was a connection from scent to three personality types, extroversion, dominance, and neuroticism. Subjects with those self-assessed personality traits had specific scents that kept being identified from the participants who rated those smelly teas. Number four. Reveals your age. Can someone smell their age? A 2012 study published in the PLOS-1 found that the elderly actually have a specific scent. The study states, body odors were sampled from three distinct age groups, young, 20 to 30 years old, middle age, 45 to 55, and old age, 75 to 95 individuals. Perpetual ratings and age discrimination performance were assessed in 41 young participants. Were these body odors sampled from cotton t-shirts? We may never know, but the study findings are pretty interesting. The study explains, participants were able to discriminate between age categories, with body odor from old age donors mediating the effect also after removing variants explained by intensity differences. Similarly, participants were able to correctly assign age labels to body odors originating from old age donors, but not to body odors originating from other age groups. So do old people have a distinct smell? According to this study, they may. And no, it's not the smell of old books or chicken casserole. Number five. What foods you eat and if you drink alcohol often. Did you know some foods do indeed contribute to your body odor? Yeah, you probably know that you smell like the garlic fries you scarfed down an hour ago, but still that sweaty cotton t-shirt you're wearing probably smells like garlic too. And not just because you dropped a couple fries on it. The Berkeley Wellness Center actually lists some foods that can affect your body odor. Red meat, cabbage, alcohol, they can mess with your scent. Notably, eating many foods high in sulfur can cause the body to excrete that high quantity of sulfur from the body through sweat. Looks like junk food can also make you smell a specific way too. An article from HuffPost explains that it's thought that the sugar present in the blood after eating junk food alters the makeup of perspiration in some people when it combines with bacteria on the skin, leading to changes in odor. So if you don't want to smell like your blood is sugary, then take it easy on the junk food for a while. Who knows what that cotton t-shirt smells like after that plate of nachos? Probably cheese. So were you surprised about what your scent can reveal about you? Feel free to let us know in the comments down below. Odds are, your crush won't consciously decline your date and bite due to your scent. That is, unless you just got done eating garlic fries when you asked them. Love close, in their ear, inches away from their nostrils. Garlic fries and nachos. Cheesy. Worth it. If you enjoyed this video, don't forget to click the like button and share it with a friend. Subscribe to Psych2Go and hit the notification bell icon for more Psych2Go content like this. See you next time Psych2Goers!