I’ve blogged about celebrity fashion, kids fashion, fashion dos and fashion don’ts, but this is my first venture into fashion trends for the fertile woman. So what prompted this unusual foray into fertility and the fashionista? A new study released today by U.S. researchers concludes: women dress to impress when they are at their most fertile.
According to researchers, the goal of the study was to prove that “signs of human ovulation may not be as mysterious as some scientists believe.” The study involved a panel of men and women assessing clothing choices of college females. Using the information provided by the panel members, researchers concluded that college students frequently wore more fashionable or flashier clothing and jewelry when they were ovulating.
“They tend to put on skirts instead of pants, show more skin and generally dress more fashionably,” said a communication studies and psychology expert at the University of California Los Angeles who led the study.
Experts wrote about their findings in the journal: Hormones and Behavior. They specifically set out to disprove the conventional wisdom that women are unique among animals in concealing, even from themselves, when they are most fertile. According to researchers, some animals release powerful scents when they are ready to mate, while others display skin color changes. Meanwhile, experts maintain, human ovulation is notoriously difficult to detect. The team of researchers said their study “showed the cues are there, even if men and women are not consciously aware of them.”
Here’s how the study worked:
Researchers recruited 30 university students without letting them know the nature of the experiment. The female subjects took urine tests to detect ovulation. The women came back several times over the course of a month and were photographed twice — once in their fertile phase and another time in their least-fertile phase. (The faces in the photographs were blacked out.) The photos were then shown to a panel of 42 men and women (some older than the volunteers) and each member was asked, “In what photo is the person trying to look more attractive?”
According to researchers, the majority of panel members (60%) chose the photograph taken during the women’s fertile phases. “This is well beyond chance. They were pretty consistent,” said the study’s leader. “One of the things we found pretty interesting is that people sort of have their personal style, almost like their uniform,” she added. “The women would show up to the lab wearing something pretty close to what they wore before, but embellished.”
For example, according to researchers, one woman wore loose knit leggings and a tank top in both photos. “In her high fertility photograph, she would be wearing a very pretty tank top and she was wearing more jewelry. The difference was quite subtle,” researchers said.
They further concluded fertile women dressed “a little bit more fashionably but not sexier.” Interestingly, the study also dismissed the popular notion that when “women approach menstrual onset, they get out their bloated clothes and they pull out their sweats.”
What are your feelings about the study’s findings?