We Still Don't Know Why Men Find Ovulating Women More Attractive

By Diane Kelly on at


We Still Don't Know Why Men Find Ovulating Women More Attractive

According to a study that will appear in PLoS One this week, it’s not a change in the colour of their faces. The idea that facial tone could signal fertility isn’t entirely crazy: females in some monkey species use facial flushing to advertise that they’re willing to mate, and humans certainly have big hairless faces with lots of exposed skin. But since pretty much nobody has ever commented on how women change colour over time, if it were true, it would have to be a very subtle effect.




This is not the pattern you’d expect for an “I’m fertile!” signal. But it does match the cyclic changes in body temperature that women experience over the course of their menstrual cycle. Typically, women have basal temperatures of around 31°C (97°F ) before ovulation, which rise to around 36°C (98°F) after ovulation and stay there until menstruation begins.

Congratulations, guys: you’ve rediscovered thermal imaging.

What’s more, Burriss and Rowland also found that while the colour changes are large enough to be picked up by a camera, they’re not large enough to be detected by human eyes. Says Burriss:


I get the sense that the team was a little disappointed by their results. Being able to say that you’d found an elusive human sexual signal would be quite the coup. But personally, I’m delighted to see a group publish negative data, so we can say that something isn’t so [PLoS One | Medium]

