Professor Matthew Cobb

Basically, you're producing odours, whether you want to or not, from your basic physiology, 24-7.

Well, a flower has a scent because it's an evolutionary adaptation to be part of the signal to a pollinating insect.

So the idea of, you know, you're deliberately and the scent both are suggesting that it's an adaptation as an evolutionary reason for smelling in a particular way.

There's no evidence that I know of that that's the case in humans.

That is that our odour is in any way an adaptation.

I mean, it's a really interesting question.

Nobody's ever asked me that.

Do we have an odour?

And I think the answer to that is probably no, because the smells we produce are a consequence of a whole series of things.

They're going to be innate factors to do with our behaviour.

common or specific genetic makeup.

There is then the environmental factors, what we've been eating, our microbiome, which is both inside us and outside us.

And then finally, there's all the perfumes and the rest of the stuff that we surround ourselves with.

So the smell of a human is quite difficult to define, I think.

Well, it's both.

Fresh sweat, I think, smells rather different from the stale sweat, the one you wouldn't want to sit next to on a plane.

But if you've just finished a workout, you're probably not going, God, I smell disgusting.

You might even be quite proud of it because you've got the sweat, which is actually showing that you've been...

Working hard.

And that contains a whole host of compounds.