This article was originally published in Le Point on 05.01.2026
This isn’t the type of thing you talk about in polite company, but here we are. Apparently, there are women out there—hundreds of thousands of them, if social media is anything to go by—who each bright new morning insert their fingers into their vaginas as though it were a secret box of perfume, and then delicately dab their wrists, necks, and behind their ears with this most intimate of scents.
The practice is called vabbing, a catchy portmanteau of “vaginal dabbing,” and it has been a viral sensation for several years now. It’s especially popular on TikTok, where ebullient female influencers promoting it as an in-the-know tactic of attracting male attention garner millions of views. Often, there’s a surge of comments from women who’ve tried it, reporting back to say that, wow, men really were fawning over them like dogs sniffing out truffles.
How much of that is just in their heads—a sort of placebo effect (vagebo effect?)—is unclear, however. This is because not a single scientific study on vabbing has ever been published. It’s the type of research question where proper, double-blinded, controlled procedures are essential. After all, one can think of dozens of alternative explanations for the perception of its efficacy. Just to name a few, women wearing such aromatic droplets may unconsciously act more solicitous or confident, behaviors leading to more male attention. They may be more vigilant to signs of male flirting. They may interpret ambiguous male responses in ways that confirm their expectations. And so on. (Still, a lack of scientific evidence hasn’t stopped some cosmetic companies from pushing “science-backed” “pheromone-infused” perfumes containing synthetic chemicals found in the human body.)
Yet while no studies have investigated whether flicking your own vaginal juices behind your ears will help you get you a date, there are plenty of studies on men’s exposure to female odors—even some creative ones involving their reactions to vulvar scents—that might shed light. First, however, to understand why some very serious scientists have devoted their careers to exploring whether other people’s odors affect our physiology and behavior in subtle but predictable ways, we need a bit of distance. A few million years, to be precise.
On the face of it, it seems rather obvious that, like every other animal on the planet, humans would be sensitive to chemical cues emitted from other bodies. From bees releasing alarm pheromones to swarm interlopers near the hive, to great whites homing in on drops of blood in the water, to dogs sniffing each other’s bums and marking their territories, adaptations for gathering information about other organisms in the environment through olfactory receptors are ubiquitous. This extends to deriving critical reproductive and mating information, such as which females are most likely to conceive.
But bitches in heat are one thing. Can human males actually smell when a woman is fertile?
Here, the evidence is equivocal. In the classic experiments, women at different stages of their reproductive cycles are asked to sleep in the same tee-shirt for several nights, and then, in a blind smell test, naïve male coders are brought into the lab and asked to rate the scents of those odorous garments. The short of it is that the shirts worn by ovulating women are judged to smell more pleasant and sexier than their counterparts. Although earlier research hinted at the possibility that inhaling a fertile woman’s sweaty tee-shirt increases male testosterone levels and even alters their psychology in ways that promote sexual risk-taking, more recent research has summarily shot those claims down. But let’s get back to vabbing, because maybe smelling a woman’s armpits isn’t quite the same as smelling her genitals. Based on the online testimonials of women in their fifties writing about how vabbing was a miraculous fix to their husband’s low libidos, I suspect that most women who are partaking aren’t even thinking about signaling their fertility status. Still, when it comes to reproductively salient information, one would think vaginas would contain more cues to fertility than armpits.
Even in chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, males routinely sniff the sexual swellings of females to help them pinpoint the exact timing of ovulation. The anogenital regions of human females, of course, don’t tend to blow up like bright red balloons at that time of the month (“concealed ovulation” is a key part of the unique evolutionary arms race between males and females of our species). Yet perhaps chemical signatures of ovulation are still present in human vaginal odors, with men being able to gauge fertility status based on those smells. There have been a few studies over the years, some from the 1970s involving men smelling tampons, but surprisingly, we just don’t know. Or at least, we didn’t until last year, when a team of German scientists led by biologist Madita Zetzsche finally went in deep.
“Odor of the genital area [in humans] remains largely unaddressed by current research,” the authors explained in an article published in Evolution and Human Behavior:
despite its significant physiological potential for sociochemical communication of fertility. The vaginal and vulvar tissues are rich in exocrine glands . . . from the mons pubis to the perineum. The labia majora contains anogenital sweat and sebaceous glands. As these glands emit secretions important for sociochemical communication, olfactory active substances may be produced across the anogenital area. Additionally, vaginal fluids are influenced by hormonal and fertility fluctuations across the menstrual cycle . . . Thus, physiological changes in the vulvar and vaginal areas towards ovulation may lead to odor variations indicative of a woman’s fertile state.
Thus, there were two main research questions at the center of Zetzsche’s investigations. First, do the “volatile profiles”—the measurable, gaseous chemical compositions—of vulvar odors change in predictable ways across the menstrual cycle? And second, can men reliably discriminate between a fertile and non-fertile woman in a blind vaginal smell test? You really must read the detailed procedures to fully appreciate how rigorously controlled and sophisticated their methods were for addressing both questions, but here’s the gist of it.
To qualify as an “odor donor,” women had to be non-smokers, not pregnant or lactating within the past six months, disease-free, not on hormonal contraception, no perfumed soap, no onions or garlic, and on a vegan diet for at least a month (“to avoid the impact of meat on odor quality”). Twenty-eight regularly cycling women, aged between 20-30, fit the bill. To ascertain the exact volatile profiles of their gaseous nether regions, the researchers invited them and their vaginas into the lab, where they instructed the ladies how to employ a two-channel air pump to draw ambient air around their vulvas into test tubes. They were to scrupulously avoid contact with the skin and, basically, handle the precious sample as though it were part of a biohazard security protocol in a containment facility. You think I’m joking? “After each session,” note Zetzsche and her colleagues, “neutral odor conditions were established by ventilating the test room for 60 min.” To further ensure that the samples weren’t contaminated, these vulvar odors, they explain further, were compared to two other types of samples: analytical blanks (same procedures but without pulling female genital air into the tube) and room blanks (air samples of the test room collected at least an hour after the last woman had left).
Once this assemblage of odors was signed, sealed, and delivered to the lab techs, the contents of each test tube could then be subjected to gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, a chemical analysis that separates and identifies the compounds within a given scent sample. What’s important to note here is that the researchers also knew exactly where each woman was in her menstrual cycle at the time of her odor donation, as they’d used highly sensitive measures—urine ovulation strips, saliva samples, chemiluminescence immunoassays of estradiol and progesterone—to establish this (i.e., they were “hormonally confirmed vulvar odor samples,” as the authors say). Anyway, I’ll spare you the highly technical details, but the takeaway was there was no support for the hypothesis that the ambient air around ovulating female genitals has its own unique chemical signature. “We determined no significant association between the overall similarity of women’s whole chemical profiles and female fertility predictors,” the authors write.
Remember, though, that seeing whether the volatile profiles of vulvae differ depending on where a woman is in her cycle was just the first research question. When it comes to smelling vaginas, perhaps men still have a sixth sense, more powerful than the most advanced laboratory instrumentation technologies, unknowingly using their flared nostrils to sniff out the most fruitful pudenda. As any respectable scientist would tell you, there’s only one way to find out. So, for this second part of the study, Zetzsche and her coauthors varied their methods a bit. In this experiment, 24 different women wore odorless cotton gauze pads inside their underwear and “covering their vulvar area” for twelve hours overnight, at different periods of their cycles. (Thus, the odors of different women could be compared, but also the same woman at different times across her cycle.) Pads were removed and deposited at the laboratory the next day and prepped for the volunteer male sniffers.
As with the strict criteria for the women, these “odor raters” also had certain requirements. They had to be non-smokers, free of nasal conditions, head trauma, or any olfactory or neurodegenerative conditions that might impair their sense of smell. Oh, and they had to be heterosexual. Given the nature of the task—men were explicitly told that they’d be asked to judge different women’s vulvar odors—I’m guessing that last rule didn’t disappoint too many volunteer prospects. In the end, a total of 139 straight men qualified, and each one rated the intimate scents of those 24 different women in two separate rating sessions over a two-week interval. With nearly 300 scent vials, that’s a lot of sniffing. Even the researchers acknowledge the burden on these brave men’s olfactory bulbs, pointing out that “each session included a 15-min break after half the samples to prevent sensory fatigue.”
The protocol conjures up a scene of skilled “noses” toiling at a perfumery in Grasse:
Odor samples were defrosted at room temperature two hours before each session. Raters were supervised by male experimenters, blinded to fertility condition, and assigned a fixed desk at which they were provided the first odor sample to be rated. Samples were presented in the opaque glass vials they had been collected and stored in, and were circulated in a clockwise order between desks, ensuring that all raters evaluated each sample in the room. Raters wore cotton gloves and were instructed to avoid exhaling onto the samples. We advised raters to smell the samples in a maximum of two sniffs.
Immediately after inhaling each scent, the male raters were asked to rate the odor on three separate dimensions: attractiveness, pleasantness, and intensity. They used a sliding scale from 1 (extremely unattractive/unpleasant/weak) to 11 (extremely attractive/pleasant/strong). Or, if they couldn’t smell anything at all, they could note that too.
For all three dimensions, the ratings hovered around “5”: as a whole, raters judged the vials not to contain aromatic scintilla from some male version of heaven, nor anything especially malodorous from the bowels of hell, but the literal scent of meh. And more to the point, those subjective evaluations held constant regardless of whether the odor donor was ovulating at the time of her scent-making, making these findings about as exciting as the results from the gas chromatography-mass spectrometry study from before. “Men’s attraction to women’s body odor was not significantly predicted by female fertility,” the authors explain.
Still, maybe, they surmise, men’s inability to use vulvar odor cues to discern which women are most likely to conceive at any given time shouldn’t be terribly surprising after all. As primates, not only has the adaptive primacy of vision led to a reduced reliance on smell (as reflected in proportionately smaller olfactory bulbs and other anatomical changes), but even within primates, we are the only species to walk upright. For better or worse, our shift to bipedalism meant that others’ anogenital regions were no longer right at our noses. Combined with modern hygiene, clothing, and cultural norms in which sniffing a stranger’s genitals became a surefire way to reduce your reproductive potential, this might all help to explain why human males tend to prefer female axillary odors over vulvar odors (and perhaps even those findings of ovulating women’s general aromas being judged as more appealing).
Actually, back in 2018, another pair of researchers kind of, sort of, indirectly, addressed that bipedalism point in a weird way. Psychologists Megan Williams and Coren Apicella from the University of Pennsylvania conceded that while we humans might have lost our reproductive skills in the nose-based olfactory domain, we have other chemosensory pathways. This includes specialized epidermal keratinocytes that respond to odor compounds—essentially allowing us to ‘smell with our skin.’ Because these specialized skin cells are found in the genital area, wondered the authors, could exposing vulvar odors to men’s penises affect their sexual behaviors? “It’s a long shot,” the authors acknowledged. Still, who knows, maybe male and female genitals just sharing the same air could influence the former’s sexual arousal. To test this, Williams and Apicella created a synthetic compound found in human vaginas, then, in another double-blinded experiment, had male participants stick either a gauze pad soaked in this female genital odor down their pants, or, in the control condition, one without those chemical compounds. (Participants wore a facemask to prevent them from smelling the genital gauze odor.) While it was down there, the men rated the attractiveness of randomly presented photos of female faces, with the idea that those in the vulvar odor condition would see the women as sexier than the controls… because those epidermal keratinocytes in their pants were breathing in those compounds and making them extra horny.
It was uncharted research territory, so just in case the manipulation worked a little too well, the authors added a thoughtful cold-shower treatment at the very end of the session: “Participants watched a 5-min video clip about plants to eliminate any potential embarrassment in the event that they were aroused during the study.” But it was all for naught. Not only did the vulvar odor gauze in their underwear not have any effect on the men’s attractiveness ratings, it also didn’t have any effects on a battery of other sexual measures (e.g., self-perceived mate value, preference for short-term over long-term mating, sexual risk-taking, desire to look at sexually explicit photographs over nature scenes).
In any case, the data all add up to some sobering news for those peddling pheromone quick fixes. Whether fun experimentation with your own juices, or, as some health experts warn, a risky viral trend, in the end vabbing is really just the smell of a vagina on a wrist.
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