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CAN’T stand that cologne you got for Christmas? Small wonder: new research
suggests that your genes help determine which perfume you prefer.

People have long used perfumes to boost their sexual attractiveness. While
it’s widely believed that perfumes are used to mask a person’s own odour, some
researchers have suggested that they may actually be used to augment and
advertise it.

Manfred Milinski at the Max Planck Institute for Limnology in Plön,
Germany, and Claus Wedekind, now at the University of Edinburgh, wanted to see
which is true. They asked 137 male and female students from the University of…

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