Discoveries continue to pour in about the significance of people’s finger lengths. Recently we wrote about studies concerning finger ratios and number of sex partners, finger ratios and the prediction of who will become a good doctor, finger ratios and the success of financial traders, and many other wonderous things. A new Swiss/French/British study reveals that the relative length of one’s fingers does not necessarily predict one’s body odor or the quality of one’s voice. The study is:
“Digit ratio (2D:4D) predicts facial, but not voice or body odour, attractiveness in men,” Camille Ferdenzi, Jean-François Lemaître, Juan David Leongómez and S. Craig Roberts, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, published online April 20, 2011. The authors, at University of Geneva, Switzerland, Université Lyon, France, and University of Stirling, UK, explain:
“There is growing evidence that human second-to-fourth digit ratio (or 2D:4D) is related to facial features involved in attractiveness… The present study extends the investigation to… voice and body odour. Pictures of faces with a neutral expression, recordings of voices pronouncing vowels and axillary odour samples captured on cotton pads worn for 24 h were provided by 49 adult male donors…. [Our results indicate that the digit ratio] did not predict voice and body odour masculinity or attractiveness.“
BONUS: The Sept/Oct 2007 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research was a special issue about The Meaning of the Finger.
