Women are rated higher in facial attractiveness if they smell good, a new study finds. 

Common belief has it that all our five senses are interconnected. Previous studies have submitted proof of this hypothesis and people experience the same in their everyday lives. You must have heard phrases like "your mouth doesn't taste what it doesn't see" and "seeing is believing." A new study by research from the Monell Chemical Senses Center found that smell influences our vision and how attractive we perceive another person to be, especially women.

For the study, 18 young adults (12 women and 6 men) were asked to rate the attractiveness and age of eight female faces, presented as photographs. Each woman in the picture was of a different age. While the rating session was in progress, one of five odors was simultaneously released. These were a blend of fish oil (unpleasant) and rose oil (pleasant) that ranged from predominantly fish oil to predominantly rose oil.

Researchers found that in the presence of pleasant odors, the participants rated the faces as more attractive than in the presence of an unpleasant odor. Contrarily, odor didn't affect the participants' age evaluation process. The participants rated the women with wrinkles and blemishes as older than the others.

"Odor pleasantness and facial attractiveness integrate into one joint emotional evaluation," said lead author Janina Seubert said in apress statement. "This may indicate a common site of neural processing in the brain."

However, researchers noted that a pleasant odor did influence the age evolution in one way. It made young women look younger and old women older. This effect was weakened in the presence of unpleasant odors, so that younger and older faces were perceived to be more similar in age.

Jean-Marc Dessirier, lead Scientist at Unilever and a co-author on the study said, "These findings have fascinating implications in terms of how pleasant smells may help enhance natural appearance within social settings. The next step will be to see if the findings extend to evaluation of male facial attractiveness."

Previous studies had shown perception of facial attractiveness could be influenced when using unpleasant or pleasant odors. However, this is the first study to look it whether odors influence the actual visual perception of facial features or alternatively, how faces are emotionally evaluated by the brain.

Findings were published in the open access journal PLOS ONE. The study was funded by the Unilever Corporation, the Swedish Research Council and the German Research Foundation.