You Can Now Tell Someone’s Sex Just By Smelling Their Hand
By now, you’ve probably noticed that everyone has a unique scent: it’s one of the reasons that lovers sometimes sniff the old shirts of their significant others when they’re lonely (hey, we aren’t judging). But researchers recently discovered that scent alone provides a way of determining someone’s sex. According to Science Alert, it’s now possible to combine smelling someone’s hand with “a fancy protein analysis machine” in order to determine a person’s sex “with darn-good accuracy.”
We know what you’re thinking: just how accurate is it? In a study involving 30 men and 30 women, smelling hands was accurate 96 percent of the time in determining whether the palm odor came from a man or a woman.
Of course, they had special technology on their side, such as a mass spectrometer, so this is definitely in the category of “don’t try this at home.”
Scientists can tell a lot from someone’s scent, including their sex, by smelling their hand.
Aside from discovering a cool new scientific trick (which, don’t get us wrong, is a worthy goal in and of itself), what good is it to be able to determine someone’s sex from simply smelling their hand and analyzing the results? In the fullness of time, this development could revolutionize forensic investigations into crimes such as murder. In the absence of biological samples or other evidence, this technique could be used to determine whether a suspect is a man or a woman.
However, don’t expect to see the investigators of your favorite criminal procedurals smelling hands for this purpose in the near future. The researchers behind this discovery caution that plenty of research is yet to be done, both to further their knowledge of the subject matter and fine-tune the forensic process. But in their published paper, the researchers are excited that this particular discovery might be paving the way for a brand new field of forensic investigation.
How Smelling Hands Can Help Police Investigations
In the original experiment, the researchers had dozens of test subjects on hand, so it was easy for the team to start smelling hands and utilizing their existing knowledge, technology, and statistical models. How would this work in forensics, then, when the suspect would have already fled the scene?
It all has to do with the fact that whenever a person touches a surface, they leave a bit of themselves behind.
For example, if you try smelling your hands, you probably won’t detect any identifying odors (unless you need to wash them). But when you touch surfaces, you leave behind both volatile compounds as well as oily secretions, and in the past, this has helped dogs to identify a suspect based on scent alone.
Police procedurals may one day include detectives sniffing a suspects hands to determine if they were at the crime scene.
The technological method created by these researchers won’t be able to identify suspects precisely, but it may serve as a “screening tool” to help narrow down whether it was a man or a woman who allegedly committed a crime.
Of course, no science is perfect, and in the original study, smelling hands did misidentify the sex of two of the participants. But it’s tough to deny that a 96 percent success rate is damn impressive, and this technique will only become more reliable over time as researchers further refine the process.
And lovers of both movies and weird science should rejoice: we’re probably less than a decade away from a Marvel movie where smelling hands to determine who is and isn’t a secret Skrull becomes a major plot point.
