A person walks into a room. Before they sit down, before they tell you their name or their story, you’ve already formed an impression of them. And they’ve likely formed one of you, too. We read each other in under a second.
We have a word for this: “energy.” We say someone has presence, a vibe or an “it factor.” For most of my career, science seemed content to leave it there—as a metaphor, a poetic shorthand for something we couldn’t fully characterize or name.
But that didn’t sit right with me. My curiosity was piqued, and my scientific appetite was hungry for answers. What is the aura that makes us feel drawn to another person?
As I dug into the established science across several fields, a picture started to emerge: Your skin is doing far more than you think, and “energy” may be more than a cute metaphor. Let me explain.
The Fastest Organ in Your Body
Princeton psychologists Alexander Todorov and Janine Willis showed years ago that we form rapid, lasting judgments about a stranger’s trustworthiness, competence and attractiveness in roughly 100 milliseconds. That is a tenth of a second.
The strange part is that this kind of perception may not depend on sight alone. My interest in the science of attraction prompted me to investigate this further, and in a 2020 pilot study, my colleagues and I explored whether visually blind individuals (with vision worse than 20/400) could make consistent attractiveness judgments comparable to those of sighted individuals—without relying on voice, touch or other obvious channels.
In other words, beauty may be sensed in ways we don’t yet fully understand. Something beyond the well-known senses appears to be transmitted between humans—something that signals attraction without requiring vision. Which raises the obvious question: What is being transmitted between individuals, and how are we receiving it?
You Are a Heat Beacon
Let’s start with the simplest answer: Your skin gives off heat. At the surface, the body is often around 33 degrees Celsius, depending on the area, and constantly radiates infrared energy. It is the kind of signal some animals use to navigate the world around them; snakes use infrared sensing to hunt, and research has shown that mosquitoes can use infrared radiation from body heat as one cue to help find humans.
Your skin is also studded with temperature-sensing receptors, including TRPV1 and TRPM8, among others, which help detect warmth, cold and shifts in the thermal environment. TRPM8, for example, is known for its role in sensing cold, while TRPV1 is involved in heat and pain signaling. When someone steps into your personal space, your nervous system may be registering subtle thermal information from the environment, even if you are not consciously aware of it—a concept researchers have explored through the lens of social thermoregulation.
Anyone who has ever felt uneasy around a person they distrusted, or warmed inexplicably toward a stranger, may be describing something more biological than mystical. That does not mean we can definitively read another person’s health or vitality through temperature alone. That conclusion remains theoretical. But the ability to detect temperature and thermal change is well established, and temperature itself can be one signal of physiology, circulation and inflammation. In that sense, the body may be picking up more than we realize.
Yes, You Are Literally Glowing
This next one sounds like science fiction, but it isn’t. Human skin emits light. Every cell in your body is running oxidative metabolism, and one byproduct of that process is a small but real release of photons—far below what the naked eye can detect. The phenomenon has a name in the literature: ultraweak photon emission. Researchers have imaged it from the human face and body and shown that it follows a daily rhythm, with changes that may be linked to energy metabolism.
Now, the honest caveat: The light is extremely faint and below what we can consciously see. So when someone says a person looks like they are glowing, they are not picking it up with their eyes in any direct way. But the emission is real, and research suggests it can change in response to oxidative stress in the skin. This is still a frontier, but it is no longer fringe. It is published, measurable and being investigated as a noninvasive biomarker of skin health.
Your Heart Fills the Room
Of all the electromagnetic fields your body produces, one of the most measurable comes from the heart. The electrical currents that drive each heartbeat also create a faint magnetic field, which is the principle behind a clinical technology called magnetocardiography. Using highly sensitive instruments, researchers can measure the magnetic fields produced by the heart.
Researchers have also explored whether signals from one person’s heart can be detected in another person’s physiological recordings when two people are close together. The idea is intriguing, but it is also an area where serious scientists are careful not to overclaim. The radiating cardiac signal is real; what it means for attraction, emotion or first impressions is still being studied.
Heart rhythm, breathing, posture and emotional state are all part of the physiological information we exchange in close proximity. Whether cardiac electromagnetic fields play a meaningful role in that exchange remains an open question, but the broader point is compelling: our bodies may be communicating below conscious awareness in more ways than we realize.
We Smell Each Other’s Feelings
A research group in the Netherlands collected sweat from men watching scary movies, disgusting movies and neutral videos. Then, they had women smell the samples without knowing what they were smelling.
Women exposed to fear-sweat showed involuntary signs associated with fear: their eyes widened, their breathing changed and they scanned their environment for threats. Women exposed to disgust-sweat showed signs associated with disgust, including wrinkled noses, narrowed eyes and reduced sniffing. In other words, they appeared to be responding to the emotional state of someone they had never met, through a chemical signal they were unaware they were detecting.
Other labs have since explored similar effects with happiness, and research suggests emotional chemosignaling may extend across cultures. The classic pheromone-attraction story—the lock-and-key signaling pathway borrowed from animal biology—remains controversial in humans. But the broader chemical channel, mediated by volatile compounds released through skin and sweat, is real and increasingly studied.
The genetic-compatibility piece is more complicated. Some research suggests major histocompatibility complex, or MHC, genes may influence body-odor preference, but the evidence in humans is mixed. What we can say is this: our skin and sweat carry chemical information, and others may be responding to more of it than they realize. In that sense, attraction may be less mysterious than it feels—and far more biological than we once thought.
And Then There Is Touch
If contact happens—a handshake, a hug, a hand on the shoulder—a fifth channel opens up. Human skin is wired with a special class of slow nerve fibers called C-tactile afferents, which are especially responsive to gentle, social touch at skin temperature and caress-like speeds. These fibers are thought to help carry the emotional quality of touch, with signals linked to areas of the brain involved in feeling, emotion and reward.
This is one biological reason hugs can work the way they do. It helps explain why a hand on the forearm during a difficult conversation can land so differently than an accidental brush. It may also be one reason the texture and quality of skin register before we are fully conscious of it. Skin is not a passive surface; it is wired for connection when touch is gentle, wanted and compassionate.
And that distinction matters. Not all touch is the same. The affectionate, empathetic kind can support bonding and trust, while unwanted or aggressive touch does the opposite. The biology is not an argument for more touch indiscriminately; it is a reminder that safe, compassionate touch has its own language.
Putting It Together
No single one of these channels explains everything. But put them together—heat, light, electromagnetic fields, chemical signals and affective touch—and you begin to see a multi-channel system that the human nervous system may be integrating beneath awareness.
This is one way to understand what we mean by “energy.” Rather than a purely mystical idea, it may be an imprecise word for a collection of biological signals we have only recently developed the tools to measure.
What This Means for Aesthetics and Skin Care
This is where my research becomes most directly relevant. For decades, the skin-care industry and plastic surgery have treated skin as a surface, a visible canvas to be looked at. We have measured success in two-dimensional photographs. We have improved appearance. We have done good work, but we may not yet have fully leveraged the neurobiology and psychosocial benefits of healthy, radiant skin.
The patient who feels better after treatment does not just look better in the mirror. She may carry herself differently, interact differently and, perhaps, transmit different signals through channels neither she nor the people around her consciously recognize. The world may respond to her differently, which in turn affects how she feels. The loop begins to close.
This is why we have started using a word the industry did not have before: moodceutical. It is my belief that all of aesthetics, not just skin care, should be built on the recognition that skin is not just a canvas. What you put on—or in—your face may change not only what people see, but also how you feel, how you move through the world and how others respond to you. That is the philosophy behind my practice, writings and teaching.
The Takeaway
Next time you walk into a room and feel something before anyone has said a word, pay attention. Your skin may be doing more of the math than you realize. The other people in the room may be doing it back. Some of these signals are measurable; others are still being studied. But together, they suggest that skin is far more than a surface.
The next direction in aesthetic medicine may not be chasing a better photograph, but taking seriously the biological and social role of the organ we have underestimated for far too long. The science is beginning to catch up to what we have always felt.
Your skin is a social organ. Treat it accordingly.
Dr. Steven H. Dayan is a board-certified facial plastic surgeon, founder of Dayan Facial Plastic Surgery and DeNova Research, and one of the most published researchers in his field on the science of first impressions and attraction. He is co-founder of XOMD Skin Care, the world’s first moodceutical brand.
