Ever read a book you really wanted to enjoy but just couldn’t get into? Luca Turin – I know you’re a big deal and all, but your book The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell is a tough old read. Even if it less than 200 pages.
For those unacquainted with the story, The Secret of Scent is basically an artsy-fartsy science book written by and about the great biophysicist Luca Turin. Who is Luca Turin, you ask? He’s only one of the leading proponents of a major smell theory – the Vibration Theory of Olfaction. A theory that holds that scent is detected not by the shape of its molecules (as others have argued) but by the vibrations they emit. A theory that, as we learn, has historically caused quite a stir in the scientific community.
In the Secret of Scent, Turin addresses this conflict head on by looking back at the various scientists who have either argued for shape theory or for vibration theory. All the while revelling in his own romantic love of fragrances.
Largely a technical read, the book is filled to the brim with molecular diagrams, which, while fascinating, are bloody difficult to grasp. As one reviewer on Goodreads notes: “There's a bunch you may have trouble following if you have trouble with standard molecular diagrams where the atoms at the joints aren't labelled”. If, like me, you didn’t pay attention in science at school, then it may come back to bite you here. Just saying.
Science lesson aside, the book does have its fun moments and is very well written in parts. Some of the metaphors Turin uses to describe fragrances are simply inspired. Take his description of a perfumery lab: “Walk down the shelves of a perfumery lab and pick a little brown glass bottle at random, then another, then another. Each, when opened, will release a different genie, a hologram of an object with an attendant.” Or his depiction of molecules as being like a: “huge flock of birds settled on a white sand beach…invisible from afar… [but, from up close] teeming with millions of birds of all sizes and colours as far as the eye can see.” I mean, can you get more spellbinding?
The book also has its brilliant facts and insights. Did you know, for example, that the discovery of musk (it its synthetic form) came during an experiment into explosives? Or that perfume school is notoriously difficult to get into if you’re not a chemistry major?
One passage that particularly sticks with me concerns a certain “perfume museum”, housed in the basement of ISIPCA: a famous cosmetics school in Versailles. Osmotheque, as it’s called, is reportedly the world’s largest scent archive and contains some of the rarest fragrances known to man.
As Turin tells us: “Go to the Osmotheque...and you will smell the Past. But even that is not so easy. The ordinary visitor has no direct access to the collection. Instead, he or she must attend a guided tour of the museum, consisting of lectures given by retired perfumers and accompanied by descriptions of smelling strips to illustrate the points made in the talks”. Talk about secretive!
Like I say, the book has good bits. You’ve just gotta rifle through a load of science guff to find it. If chemistry is your bag though, you might just go bananas for the book.
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