Hand odour can reveal a person’s sex

The smell left behind by someone’s hand can reveal their gender, a new study suggests.

The study, led by Kenneth Furton of Florida International University, shows it is possible to predict a person’s sex based on hand scents, and existing research indicates scent compounds may also reveal a person’s age, race, and ethnicity.

The university report suggested that if the results can be validated with further research, this could eventually be used to uncover more details about a potential criminal, solely through their hand scent profiles. Researchers used a technique called ‘mass spectrometry’ to analyse the scent compounds present on the palms of 60 people – half male and half female.

After identifying the compounds in each sample, they conducted an analysis to see if they could determine the individual’s sex based on their profile of scents. According to the study, the analysis successfully predicted a person’s sex with a 96.67 per cent accuracy rate. Fingerprints and DNA are the biometrics most commonly utilised to identify a suspect or victim of a crime. However, on occasion these forms of evidence can be found in quantities that are too small to be used, leaving little to no forensic evidence that can be used for prosecution. Even in these instances where no physical fingerprint or DNA evidence is found, human scent evidence may still be recovered and used as an individualising feature in an investigation

“Well-trained canines operate as specialised sentient detectors able to distinguish and identify personal human odour and other chemicals of interest. Though canines have been proven to reliably identify persons based on their odour profile, laboratory based subject identification using analytical instruments has been difficult due to the lack of robust datasets and sufficiently developed analytical techniques”, the report stated.
Robberies, assaults, and rape are all crimes that are often executed with a perpetrator’s hands, and have the potential to leave behind valuable traces of evidence at a crime scene. With further validation, the chemical and statistical analyses presented in this paper could be used to uncover many details about a potential perpetrator solely through their hand scent profiles. This approach to analysing hand odours can be applied when other discriminatory evidence such as DNA is lacking and allow for differentiation or class characterisation such as sex, race and age”, the report stated.

The study was published in the open access journal PLOS ONE on Wednesday July 5.