Is the Lynx Effect real?

lynx effect Lynx run a series of tongue in cheek adverts promoting their product’s ability to improve your attractiveness to women.  Some of them are very amusing.  I always have a twinge of concern with these kinds of things though.  Some people are very sensitive about their lack of appeal to the opposite sex, and I do wonder if these adverts play on people’s insecurities without actually offering them a solution.  Nobody actually believes that spraying a mid-price fragrance onto themselves is going to actually help their prospects with the ladies. Or will it?

But maybe I am wrong about this.  There may be something to it after all.  Some recent work, a collaboration between Liverpool University and Unilever suggests that there may be a mechanism whereby this product, and indeed other similar products, might be effective.  And bizarre as it might sound, the adverts themselves might well have something to do with it.

Thirty five men were assigned a deodorant product, half of which were without the fragrance and deodorant ingredients. The men’s self confidence and how good looking they perceived themselves to be before applying the product was assessed by a questionnaire.  They had to rely solely on the product given to them for two days: they weren’t allowed to wash.   They then recorded a dating video. The video was played to women – obviously they couldn’t smell the men – and they were asked to rate them.  It turned out that the ones that had the fragrance and the active were rated higher by the women.  The men with the fragrance themselves rated themselves with higher confidence and self perceived attractiveness.

So it seems if you smell better, you feel better about yourself, you are more confident and in turn this makes you more attractive to women.  So there really is a Lynx effect.

I am grateful to Unilever for publishing their results.  But I have to say that this finding is going to be applicable to most fragranced products.  If you know you smell good, you feel good, you feel confident and that air of confidence makes you not only feel more attractive – you actually are more attractive.  This is going to qualify as an official Colin’s Beauty Pages Beauty Tip.

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