A man's scent can make women drink more alcohol, study claims

The scent of a man can make a woman drink more alcohol than usual, a study has claimed.

Researchers from the Department of Psychology at the University of South Florida decided to explore how a man’s scent can affect a woman’s decision to drink after carrying out a similar experiment on men.

The previous investigation demonstrated how the scents emitted by women who were at the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle prompted men to drink an increased amount of alcohol.

This time, the researchers used 103 women from the ages of 21 and 31 to ascertain whether the same could be said for the other way around.

The female participants believed they were taking part in a consumer survey for men’s cologne and drinks.

They were presented with fragrance strips that had been sprayed with either manufactured androstenone, a pheromone found in boar’s saliva, or plain water.

They were then given two, 12-ounce glasses of non-alcoholic beer each.

The women who had been exposed to the androstenone scent drank more than those who hadn’t, consuming approximately one tenth a 12-ounce glass of beer more over the course of 10 minutes.

“We inferred that detection of male sexual scents, even in the absence of awareness, may instigate drinking because of the longstanding cultural association between alcohol use and sex,” the study stated.

While the researchers admit that the results from the laboratory may not necessarily correlate with real-life circumstances, the two studies have displayed how scent can influence the amount alcohol that men and women drink.

The drinking habits of men and women have changed considerably over the last century.

A recent report published in the medical journal BMJ Open outlined how men would often drink twice as much than women at the beginning of the 20th Century.

However, women have started catching up, with men born since the 1980s allegedly only 1.1 times more likely to drink than women.