In a small study, researchers in an olfaction lab found that people who had an instant personal connection also had similarities in their body odors.

But scientists who study human olfaction, or your sense of smell, wonder if the molecules wafting off our skin may be registering at some subconscious level in the noses and brains of people around us.

Indeed, in a small study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, researchers investigating pairs of friends whose friendship “clicked” from the beginning found intriguing evidence that each person’s body odor was closer to their friend’s than expected by chance.

And when the researchers got pairs of strangers to play a game together, their body odors predicted whether they felt they had a good connection.

Scientists who study friendship have found that friends have more in common than strangers — not just things like age and hobbies, but also genetics, patterns of brain activity and appearance.

They were interested to find that, indeed, the friends’ odors were more similar to each other than those of strangers.

However, there are many reasons friends might smell alike — eating at the same restaurants, having a similar lifestyle and so on — making it difficult to say if the smell or the basis for the relationship came first.

Ravreby and colleagues; experiments in which strangers get close enough to smell each other have been difficult to set up.

But now, the team is looking into modifying people’s body odor to see whether subjects who’ve been made to smell similarly band together.