The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - September 15, 2025


Chatting with the Owner of the Lili Bermuda Perfumery-The Science of Olfaction (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_878)

Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Lily Bermuda Perfumery
Discussing Erika Kirk's TV Address with Jesse Watters (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_877) ‘Thank God For ELON!’ Dr. Gad Saad on Musk, Trump, Charlotte Murder and Woke (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_880)

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

166.05

Word count

602

Sentence count

48

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Isabel is the mother of a student I had a couple of years ago in my course and she was kind enough to offer me an unbelievable bottle of Perfumery, which I still wear whenever I can. We are here in Bermuda now, and I was going to share some of my evolutionary research that links to olfaction. You ready for this?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I am here at Lily Bermuda Perfumery with the owner of the gorgeous place, Isabel.
00:00:07.260 How are you doing? I'm good, how are you? Good.
00:00:09.520 So for people who don't know, Isabel is the mother of a fantastic student I had a couple of years ago in my course.
00:00:17.020 They were kind enough to offer me an unbelievable bottle of perfume, which I still wear whenever I can.
00:00:22.940 We are here in Bermuda now, and I was going to share some of my evolutionary research or a place of some of my colleagues that links to the olfaction.
00:00:33.580 You ready for this? I am.
00:00:34.900 Okay, so number one, there's a study done by some of my colleagues from the University of New Mexico where they asked men to wear a bunch of T-shirts so that it's imbued with their smell.
00:00:47.460 And then they take off those shirts, they put them in a bag, and then random women would come and smell each of those T-shirts to judge which is the one that is most attractive in terms of its olfaction. 0.81
00:01:00.400 And the one that they chose as the most attractive also corresponded to the man who was the most symmetric, meaning that they are able to detect the quality of a man not only through the nose, but the nose also correlates to the visual sense.
00:01:19.360 So the guy who smells the best also looks the best.
00:01:22.620 So that's study one related to olfaction.
00:01:25.560 The second one more relevant to perfumes is a study that was done by, I think, some Czech colleagues, I don't know, I can't remember where you're from, where they looked at the major histocompatibility complex, which is a set of hormones that say something about your immune system.
00:01:43.360 And it turns out that which perfume goes well with you depends on your MHC.
00:01:49.900 So two men can wear the same perfume, and yet on one man you say, oh my God, it smells so nice, and on another man you'll say it smells so badly, and it turns out that it is linked to a specific set of genes called the MHC.
00:02:04.860 What is MHC?
00:02:06.600 Major histocompatibility complex.
00:02:09.660 It's a set of genes that serve as an olfactory signal of their immune system.
00:02:14.540 So typically, we prefer people who smell as much dissimilar to us as possible.
00:02:22.820 Yeah, that makes sense.
00:02:23.440 Because you want your children to have as much, you know, immunological insurance.
00:02:31.060 Naturally, yes.
00:02:32.400 Naturally.
00:02:33.080 So it is one of the only traits where we look for someone who is dissimilar to us.
00:02:37.620 Usually we look for what's called assortative mating. 0.99
00:02:40.180 So, for example, height, women like guys who are taller than them, right? 0.99
00:02:44.960 We choose people who share our beliefs and our values.
00:02:48.920 The only trait that where we choose someone who is maximally different from us is based on this one.
00:02:55.580 I knew that because, I knew that one because of, yeah, you want to make sure that there's no incest.
00:03:04.460 That's true, too.
00:03:05.340 And you're supposed to hate the smell of your brother.
00:03:09.980 And when you're a teenager, you hate the smell of your mother and of your father because for protection.
00:03:17.080 Yeah, there you go.
00:03:17.720 Yeah, no, that's very cool.
00:03:18.940 So you do the art part of perfumery.
00:03:21.520 Interesting.
00:03:21.820 I do the scientific part.
00:03:23.100 I love it.
00:03:23.620 I want to know what the smell of the guy who has symmetrical features.
00:03:28.760 It's basically, basically, I want to make a perfume up now.
00:03:31.960 So you're looking at him, basically.
00:03:33.140 Oh, okay.
00:03:35.080 Thank you so much.
00:03:36.120 That's so sweet.
00:03:36.920 Thank you.
00:03:37.400 Cheers.