Scent and sound are just as important as looks when it comes to appeal

Researchers found people can work out an unexpected range of characteristics from how someone smells. Photo / 123RF

Attractiveness isn't just a matter of good looks, but also having the right voice and scent, according to a new study.

Researchers found people can work out an unexpected range of characteristics from how someone smells, including how big they are and whether they're emotional.

The study also suggests listening to the way someone talks has an evolutionary advantage as it helps us chose the right mate, proving the way you talk is just as important as what you say, reports Daily Mail.

"Perceiving others through all three channels gives a more reliable and broader variety of information about them," said Agata Groyecka, lead author of the review and a researcher at the University of Wroclaw in Poland.

The study, which involved looking through 30 years of literature, revealed your voice reveals more than your gender and age.

Listeners have also proven to be skilled at detecting an unexpected range of characteristics including the dominance, cooperativeness, emotional state, and even the body size of the speaker.

Even more surprisingly, other studies have shown that people can correctly deduce very similar types of information based on scent alone.

These signals send unique messages about the individual's condition and whether they might be a good mate.

Researchers believe there is an evolutionary advantage to multisensory aspects of attraction as it means positive traits can be detected both from a distance (voice and looks), as well as up close (scent).

Research suggests that although people tend to find faces that look similar to their own attractive they prefer the smell of people with dissimilar genes.

This suggests that taking into account how people look and smell gives us an optimal understanding of who is genetically a good match.

"Recently, most reviews have focused on visual attractiveness -for example, face or body attractiveness," said Dr Groyecka.

"Acoustic and olfactory cues can, separately or in combination, strongly influence the perceived attractiveness of an individual and therefore attitudes and actions and actions towards that person", researchers said.

"Literature about other senses and their role in social relations has grown rapidly and should not be neglected."

Researchers discuss the "highly complex and multimodal nature of person perception" in their paper, published in Frontiers.