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Researchers from University of Jena, Dresden and Wrocław win Ig Nobel Prize
Babies smell wonderful – at least to their parents. An international research team of Ilona Croy, Tomasz Frackowiak, Thomas Hummel and Agnieszka Sorokowska investigated why teenagers lose this special olfactory advantage – and has now been awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for the research.
“Science is about curiosity, the joy of experimentation and, at its best, a certain degree of craziness. That is precisely what this prize celebrates – the fun of doing research. So we were genuinely delighted to receive the Ig Nobel Prize,” says Ilona Croy, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Institute of Psychology at Friedrich Schiller University Jena.
The name “Ig Nobel” is a play on “Nobel” and the English word “ignoble”, and the awards can be regarded as the playful counterpart to the Nobel Prizes. Each year, the Annals of Improbable Research awards ten prizes to surprising scientific studies that “first make people laugh, then make them think”.
This principle certainly applies to the team’s research. It began with a simple question: Why do babies smell so pleasant to their parents – and what happens to this smell during puberty?
For the initial study, published in 2017, 255 mothers and fathers were asked to rate their child’s body odour. For comparison, they also rated the body odour of their partner. The results showed that the vast majority of parents found the body odour of babies and young children particularly pleasant – even more pleasant than that of their partner. As the children grew older, however, this particular olfactory preference decreased markedly. This was independent of how positively parents rated their relationship with their child.
The questionnaire study became the starting point for a series of further experiments. Croy and her colleagues collected body odour samples from more than 300 children of different ages and presented them to parents and non-parents. Some of the experiments were conducted using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
The results extends the “Kindchenschema” which was discovered 80 years ago first in relation to the visual features of young children: babies and young children do not only look cute, they also smell adorable. Infant body odour activates key regions of the brain’s pleasure and reward system and may thereby promote caregiving behaviour.
Parents, however, are particularly good at recognising and show a preference for the body odour of their own baby and child. This changes around puberty: parents have greater difficulty recognising their teenager by smell, while mothers may even show an aversion to the body odour of their sons and fathers to that of their daughters. After puberty, parents become accustomed to their children’s body odour again and once more show a preference for it.
“Our research shows that human body odours convey social and biological information that shapes the way we interact with one another,” Croy explains. “And perhaps it also tells us something about love: we are biologically predisposed to care for our offspring. At the same time, we can learn to love the familiar smell of those close to us again, even as it changes over the course of their lives. In short: babies smell wonderful. Teenagers, not quite so much. But we love them anyway.”
The award ceremony took place on 3 September 2026 at the Kongresshaus Zürich – the first time in the history of the Ig Nobel Prizes that the ceremony was held in Europe, following 35 years in Cambridge and Boston in the United States. One reason for the move was that in 2025, members of several international winning teams decided not to travel to the US, citing visa restrictions and concerns about immigration and border policies, among other factors. More than 9,000 new nominations are submitted to the Ig Nobel committee each year. These are added to a large pool of nominations from previous years, from which ten prize-winning studies are ultimately selected.
Prof. Dr. Ilona Croy
Institut für Psychologie der Universität Jena
Am Steiger 3, Haus 1, 07743 Jena
Tel.: 03641 / 945141
E-Mail: ilona.croy@uni-jena.de
Croy, I., Frackowiak, T., Hummel, T. & Sorokowska, A. (2017): Babies smell wonderful to their parents, teenagers do not: An exploratory questionnaire study on children’s age and personal odor ratings in a Polish sample. Chemosensory Perception, 10(3), 81–87. doi: 10.1007/s12078-017-9230-x
Follow-up studies
Schäfer, L., Sorokowska, A., Sauter, J., Schmidt, A. H. & Croy, I. (2020): Body odours as a chemosignal in the mother–child relationship: New insights based on an human leucocyte antigen-genotyped family cohort. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2019.0266
Schäfer, L., Sorokowska, A., Weidner, K., Sauter, J., Schmidt, A. H. & Croy, I. (2024): Body odours as putative chemosignals in the father-child relationship: New insights on paternal olfactory kin recognition and preference from infancy to adolescence. Physiology & Behavior. doi: 10.1016/j.physbeh.2024.114505
Croy, I., Mohr, T., Weidner, K., Hummel, T. & Junge-Hoffmeister, J. (2019): Mother-child bonding is associated with the maternal perception of the child's body odor. Physiology & Behavior. doi: 10.1016/j.physbeh.2018.09.014
Schäfer, L., Köppel, C., Kreßner-Kiel, D., Schwerdtfeger, S., Michael, M., Weidner, K., & Croy, I. (2024): The scent of cuteness—neural signatures of infant body odors. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsae038
Prof. Dr Ilona Croy of Friedrich Schiller University Jena has been awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for her ...
Quelle: Photo: Anne Günther/Uni Jena
The familiar smell of your own child: Parents tend to perceive their children’s body odour particula ...
Quelle: Photo: Anne Günther/Uni Jena
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