The very word "perfume" has feminine meaning to many male ears. Men can be sold" deodorant (除臭剂)", but the idea of all those little bottles with their fussy paraphernalia (随身用具) is too much for the sensitive male ego. Yet no industry can afford to neglect half its potential market, and perfume-makers are ever keen to crack the shell of male silence. Now they may know how to do so.
Craig Roberts of the University of Liverpool and his colleagues -- working with a team from Unilever’s research laboratory at nearby Port Sunlight -- have been investigating the problem. They already knew that appropriate scents can improve the mood of those who wear them. What they discovered, though, as they will describe in a forthcoming edition of the International Journal of Cosmetic Science, is that when a man changes his natural body odor it can alter his self-confidence to such an extent that it also changes how attractive women find him.
Half of Dr Roberts’s volunteers were given an aerosol spray(烟雾喷剂) containing a commercial formulation of fragrance. The other half were given a spray identical in appearance but lacking active ingredients. The study was arranged so that the researchers did not know who had received the scent and who the fake. Each participant obviously knew what he was spraying on himself, since he could smell it. But since no one was told the true purpose of the experiment, those who got the fake did not realize they were being matched against people with a properly smelly aerosol.
Over the course of several days, Dr Roberts’s team conducted several psychological tests on both groups of volunteers. They found that those who had been given the commercial fragrance showed an increase in self-confidence. Not that surprising, perhaps. What was surprising was that their self-confidence improved to such an extent that women who could watch them but not smell them noticed. The women in question were shown short, silent videos of the volunteers. They deemed the men wearing the deodorant more attractive. They were, however, unable to distinguish between the groups when shown only still photographs of the men, suggesting it was the men’s movement and bearing, rather than their physical appearance, that was the difference.
For Unilever and other manufacturers of men’s scent, this is an important discovery. The firm’s marketing of its, main product in this area, a deodorant called Lynx, plays up the so-called" Lynx Effect"-- which is supposed to make men irresistibly attractive to women. Dr Roberts’s experiment, however, suggests that the advertised "Born chicka wah wah" of the product may have nothing to do with a woman’s appreciation of the smell, and everything to do with its psychological effect on the man wearing it.
What conclusion can we get from the passage