What’s That Amazing New Baby Scent — and Can You Recreate It?
It’s nearly impossible to describe the scent of a newborn baby – especially since each baby seems to have his or her own – but if you’ve ever gotten up close to a newborn and inhaled deeply, you know exactly what we’re talking about. It’s not just baby shampoo and dirty diapers, either; in most cases, you won’t even be able to identify exactly what it is. And then one day, it’s just gone – often without you even realizing it’s been fading. But can you recreate it? Read on to find out.
Is “New Baby Smell” Really a Thing?
Although any parent would answer this question with an, “Absolutely!” the scientific community is less decisive. There have been very few studies done on this phenomenon, but a 2012 study did find evidence of “old people smell” – as CNN put it, “a recognizable body odor that can’t be fully explained by grooming, diet, or other environmental quirks.” One of the study’s authors theorized that a smell related to a certain age group may be an evolutionary relic designed to help humans choose their mates. So it’s not impossible that babies might also have a scent of their own – thought not so much for mating purposes.
Why Would Babies Have a Smell?
It seems possible that new baby smell would also serve an evolutionary purpose – for example, to help a mother identify her baby more easily, similarly to how babies can identify their mothers by smell almost immediately. A 2001 study reported in The Washington Post and Baltimore City Paper suggested that the smell was more important to fathers, though: researchers found that dads were better able to smell it than moms, leading them to theorize that, in mammals, the smell may encourage males to be more nurturing of their own offspring. And a 2008 study of marmoset monkeys showed that fathers who smelled their newborns showed a drop in testosterone, which could make them “more tolerant toward his infants while facing external challenges that might distract him from focusing on his infant and family needs.”
So What Exactly Does a New Baby Smell Like?
Well, as long as you’re not dousing your little one in baby perfume (yes, they make perfume for babies), then no one’s really sure. It’s been suggested that new baby smell is really a combination of amniotic fluid, bacteria, breast milk, and other ingredients that you’d generally not look for in a sweet-smelling fragrance. And since there are still so many questions about what it is and why it exists, recreating it exactly is, sad to say, pretty unlikely – but the next time you open a box of old baby clothes and get a whiff of the familiar detergent, soap, powder, and fabric, don’t be surprised if you’re transported right back to those newborn days, able to conjure up your baby’s scent from memory.