So ladies, ever had one of those days when you get up, think, “what shall I wear today?” and decide to go glam, or that you can’t be bothered? Think you have free will in this decision? Oh dear. Go read this.

“Near ovulation, women dress to impress, and the closer women come to ovulation, the more attention they appear to pay to their appearance,” said Martie Haselton, the study’s lead author and a UCLA associate professor of communication studies and psychology. “They tend to put on skirts instead of pants, show more skin and generally dress more fashionably.”

I tend to be rather suspicious of psychology experiments, but this one seems to have been done with a fair amount of care. The sample size was rather small, but they did make a serious effort not to bias their definition of what “dressing attractively” meant.

Add this to my prevous post about women being more risk averse when they have high levels of estrogen in their bodies and it all starts to get rather scary. I’m sure that someone will be able to identify what hormones or whatever trigger the “sexy dressing” behavior pattern. Pheromonal warfare, anyone? (And yes, there will be things that work on men too. We know that, don’t we.)