You don't know who Luca Turin is? Some people think he's a hack and others a genius. I am on the side of genius. Whether or not his biology is worthy, the man has a nose and a sense of metaphor that changed my life. Let me explain.
One Friday evening bookshop expedition, I found a tiny hardcover in among the bold spines of other popular science titles. The cover is a smokey black and the title is written in a modern serif font, with large spaces between the letters lending it an edge of elegance: The Emperor of Scent.
The subtitle reads: "A story of perfume, obsession and the last mystery of the senses." Sprouting from this is a white dew-covered flower and two buds. The smokey grey is the dark background of the image, bleeding out.
The book is a memoir written by Chandler Burr, a journalist for the New York Times who wrote their perfume reviews - don't raise your eyebrows; you are still to discover the hidden world that is your sense of smell. It describes biophysicist Turin's increasing interest in our organ of smell and the perfume industry.
Like the war between Chomsky and Skinner, Turin pits the molecule vibration theory against the perfume industry's shape theory. The memoir is obviously weighted in support of Turin and casts him as the persecuted cowboy fighting the ills of urbanisation, and disregards contradictory evidence. This aside, Burr explains the theories clearly without patronising the reader, so even I felt like a competent biologist.
What enamoured me, though, were the descriptions of everyday scents, which break the smells into their components and build them back up again. Then there are the more unusual scents, which I doubt I have ever smelt, but can imagine. His metaphors are precise and you can't imagine any other plausible exposition of their merits and failures. The man is an olfactory genius.
The book obviously has implications for your reading of Perfume by Patrick Suskind, and vice versa. But it also has implications for your interactions with the world around you, using a sense that you probably never thought much of, sight and sound remaining the Zeuses of your sensory world, but in Turin's world our Hermes rules.
With the success of The Emperor of Scent, which somehow had gone out of print the last time I tried to get a copy, Turin has co-authored a guide to commercial perfumes, called simply Perfumes. The cover is beautiful, but what you don't see are the embossed, foiled and spot-varnished details.
Now I can get a fix of Turin every day, in his often scathing reviews of various perfumes (even those he ranks a five). Take for example, one of my favourites: Angel by Thierry Mugler. Calling the perfume "a high-energy state of contradiction" and "a joke", he breaks it down into:
a handsome, resinous woody patchouli straight out of the pipes-and-leather-slippers realm of men's fragrance, in a head-on collision with a bold blackcurrant and a screechy white floral.
This isn't the ambiguous realm of wine tastings, folks - find yourself a perfume stockist and try Angel. Then try another perfume and see if you can smell its components and how they work together. It's a miracle; I was blind but now I see. Whereas the epics among wine vintages suffer when set to a blind tasting, perfumes do not. You can distinguish a good perfume from a bad one almost instantly. Cheap perfumes are always bad, but so are most of the expensive ones.
If Angel is a joke, it is that of Truman Capote, while most perfumes are the slapstick comedies of Jim Carey or the gush of Maid in Manhattan.
This post came about from a recent foray into the perfume aisle. Oh dear heaven above, many of the perfumes have nice elements but ruin them by the dosing of one that drowns the rest. Not only against my skin, but against the objective whiteness of those paper strips. I felt like a walking headache.
With Turin's help, you understand how a perfume should engage with your own natural scent. How this engagement changes over the course of the day. How you shouldn't be able to smell a perfume that complements you, except for whiffs as you turn or gesture.
And the wonderful thing about this is, I think, something that is misunderstood about Turin. His is not the definitive off-with-her-head sentence on a perfume. Scent is about you. How it assists in creating your own identity, just as clothing does. (You can deny this, but then deny that you routinely categorise people based on superficial signals because you are able to process the immense amount of stimuli you are subjected to every day. I suspect that if this were true, you'd never leave your bedroom.)
I don't mind being a "perverse" joke, provided the meaning of it is my own.
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