tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74694872578325940122023-11-15T08:36:15.405-08:00Double Base NotesAn archive of the period July, 2003 - July, 2010 of the English text of "Duftnotes" by Luca Turin. Apologies as the original comments have not been captured.CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.comBlogger86125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469487257832594012.post-85646458504947849922012-12-17T12:01:00.001-08:002012-12-17T12:01:04.163-08:00The 7 month PDFFrom <a href="http://www.basenotes.net">Base Notes</a> posted by <a href="http://www.basenotes.net/members/13373491-Birdboy48?s=a8a39ccff7d307f9db8b83a15b038c9b">Birdboy48</a>:
<blockquote>Here's a link for the text of the 7 month period ( June 2005- Jan 2006 ) of Duffnotes mentioned in the OP. Unlike the link above, this one includes all the reader comments and Turin's responses. The inclusion of which makes the thing "only" 548 pages long ! One can understand why the full run of posts shown above leaves out the comments.
For those who are gluttons for punishment, or simply Turin fans, this link also includes a search function in a toolbar at the bottom of the page.
<a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/12441738/Blog-Text-Web-LUCA-TURIN">http://www.scribd.com/doc/12441738/Blog-Text-Web-LUCA-TURIN</a></blockquote>CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469487257832594012.post-38463906995857388772010-07-21T13:43:00.000-07:002010-07-21T14:40:55.257-07:00"Notes from the nose -- The Last Duftnote" By Luca Turin"The Last Duftnote" By Luca Turin<br /><br />This, friends, will be my last Duftnote. Actors want to direct, artists want to run the Ministry of Culture, dancers want to be choreographers, and I want to write about something other than smell. But before I go, I give you the Duftnote of 2030:<br /><br />IFRA is over. Now that we can stimulate olfactory cells directly with light, there’s no need for chemicals. At least, there hasn't been since 2013, when a group at the Media Lab (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, my current place of work) successfully replicated a convincing smell of bacon by shining light pulses at three different wavelengths.<br /><br />Three years later the technology was sufficiently advanced that perfumers were fooled about whether they were smelling rose oil or light. MIT Chemistry students were among the first to use the technology to identify and remember molecules by associating them with tunes. My son at age 10 smelled wintergreen in a cough drop and said, “Smoke and mint.” When he and his musically-minded sister arrived at MIT, they soon figured out the smoke and mint chords and learned to play them at different speeds—it turns out arpeggiato is best—until they got wintergreen.<br /><br />In 2019 at age 20 my son finished a degree in Optogenetic Engineering, while his sister’s third-year assignment at Juilliard was a 3-minute smell piece in which she starts out with a huge cluster chord that smells like wet dog and and one by one removes all the bad notes, ending with Jicky played pianissimo.<br /><br />To smell a perfume these days, all you do is spray a solution containing about 200 different harmless viruses up your nose. Each virus infects a different type of olfactory receptor and instructs it to make a particular protein, which pumps electric charge across the membrane when exposed to light of a particular color. After about 18 to 24 hours, the proteins are in place.<br /><br />You insert a small fiber optic into your nostril. It is connected to a small machine containing a dozen tunable lasers, which in turn is connected to your laptop and can read a variety of formats like .olf, .noz and .mp7. (Not familiar with them? You haven’t been paying attention.)<br /><br />I bought one of the early prototype machines and spent several months just going up and down the scale of molecular vibrations and endlessly playing Vince Guaraldi’s “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” (the second chord smells of lavender soap) on an iPad MIDI keyboard. That was a while ago. Now of course ITunes has a smellable books section, and you can visit the Osmothèque remotely.<br /><br />But the best things are completely new: the strange, stately harmonies of smell are now explored by a generation of “nazers,” a movement started in Paris around 2020 that soon took over the world. You are all familiar with their work, no need to go into it. I knew they were onto something when I smelled a piece by Calice Becker’s granddaughter that went from bread to nail varnish to curry in the opening bar. I am smelling her second album as I write.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston</span>CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469487257832594012.post-29617059974752426582010-06-01T02:08:00.000-07:002010-07-21T14:08:49.470-07:00"Two Italian Perfumers" By Luca Turin<a href="http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/d80bd71b-b264-4db4-afd0-277884b93470/showarticle/3fe226bf-0618-4c73-bd81-2bb080a413c7.aspx">"Two Italian Perfumers" By Luca Turin</a><br /><br />I was recently in Milan and set off on an aimless walk west of the Duomo, past Peck, the landmark delicatessen with a prodigious wine basement — 4-litre jeroboams of Sauternes for the price of a car — through quiet streets named after the clangorous trades of swordsmiths, armourers and spurriers, and eventually past a small perfumery belonging to the Farmacia next door at Via Spadari 13. I still cannot resist the sight of unknown perfume bottles, so I doubled back and stepped in.<br /><br />The place is run by an elegant, courtly woman in her fifties who gives her name only as Jelly, no surname. What caught my eye was an array of ten cubical bottles, which turned out to be a line of fragrances designed by one of her long-time customers, Scipione Zanella, a Venetian businessman and fragrance aficionado. Two years ago, having decided that the state of perfumery was unsatisfactory, he walked in to see Ms Jelly one day, declared his intent to create perfumes and asked her what she thought his first creation should smell of. She suggested a linden blossom on the grounds that the only known fragrance of that type, d’Orsay’s Tilleul, could do with some company. To her surprise he appeared a few weeks later with a linden, poetically named F-051 . Over the next year or so his firm, Onediffusion, came up with nine more, all numbered like industrial prototypes. I started smelling them on strips and was very impressed, all the more so because Mr Zanella is said to be the perfumer: these are confident, big-boned, mature, durable fragrances in the classical mold, made with a judicious mixture of naturals and synthetics, sold at perfume concentration and handsomely packaged. My favorite is F-055, a cross between Lauder’s Beautiful and Piguet’s Fracas, a buttery tuberose against a fluorescent woody-rosy background.<br /><br />By coincidence, on my return to the US I found a package containing the works of another independent Italian perfumer, Maria Candida Gentile. These mercifully have names rather than numbers and are rich, warm, versicolored, joyful compositions that make you smile with pleasure. Ms Gentile seems to proceed by successive approximations from one fragrance to another and her creations have a strong family resemblance. Unlike many firms, she does not try to do the canonical set to please every type of customer. Those who appreciate the Histoires de Parfums range should try her fragrances.<br /><br />The fact that these two firms are Italian is a break with tradition. Italian perfumery so far has largely stuck to four genres: derivative, comfortable spicy-floral fragrances from Krizia’s Teatro alla Scala onwards, overpackaged, expensive cod-apothecary products like Villoresi and SMN, insane hippy foghorn confections like Nasomatto and a host of bloodless eco-friendly claptrap with handwritten labels. Onediffusion and MCG are neither provincial nor touristy, do not frighten horses or save the planet: they are proper fragrances, the way the French used to do them when they still cared.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston.</span>CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469487257832594012.post-45520032174984998062010-05-01T02:07:00.000-07:002010-07-21T14:07:51.526-07:00"Anosmia" By Luca Turin<a href="http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/d80bd71b-b264-4db4-afd0-277884b93470/showarticle/de091a9e-0c2f-404e-86d5-f5fcc2c456e7.aspx">"Anosmia" By Luca Turin</a><br /><br />Two weeks ago I received a phone call from a concert pianist and piano teacher in New York who had gradually lost his sense of smell over a period of years, to the point where only three things still smelled faintly: coffee, chocolate and shit. He had seen an ENT specialist, who apparently looked up his nose and told him that his “olfactory bulb” was looking fine, a remarkable feat considering the bulb is inside the brain. The specialist prescribed a mineral supplement, the medical equivalent of airline sweets.<br /><br />Several things this distinguished musician told me were typical of most people in his unfortunate position. First, losing your sense of smell elicits no sympathy whatsoever. Second, those who lose it often feel a terrible loss because what we call taste is mostly smell, so all the pleasures of food are denied to anosmics. All you’re left with is salty, sour, bitter, sweet and umami, not much to go on. Third, the effect on mood is terrible, perhaps unexpectedly so. Another anosmia victim was the journalist Mick O’Hare, who edits the New Scientist magazine. He is as buoyant, positive a man as you’re likely to meet. Yet when he lost his sense of smell after a bad cold he considered suicide.<br /><br />His story is exemplary in another respect, because he was cured. After searching high and low, he found a doctor in Washington DC called Robert Henkin who treated him with a drug called theophylline, formerly an asthma medication. It is not clear why this works, and theophylline is not without risks. However, it worked for Mick O’Hare: after over a year his sense of smell started to came back, as luck would have it, while he was on the toilet. He described this to me as “the best smell ever”.<br /><br />There are basically four reasons why your sense of smell might not work. The most common is simply a mechanical obstacle preventing the air from reaching the inconspicuous patch of mucosa where the receptor cells dangle in the breeze. That can be figured out by looking up your nose. The second, and most common is post-viral anosmia. An unusually hardy rhinovirus gives you a common cold and takes the opportunity to wipe out the olfactory neurons. These normally grow back —no other part of the nervous system does that so well— but sometimes they don’t. The third reason is something wrong inside your brain, either due to a blow to the head, a tumor or a degenerative disease. Smell loss is an early indicator of several nasty illnesses from Alzheimer’s to Parkinson’s. Finally, there is a collection of other causes such as zinc deficiency, cadmium poisoning etc.<br /><br />The most important thing if you suffer smell loss is not to suffer it in silence, and to find a doctor who takes it seriously. Make sure it is not a blockage, then see a neurologist. You only have five senses, and none to spare.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston.</span>CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469487257832594012.post-43242746232860316592010-04-01T02:06:00.000-07:002010-07-21T14:07:01.867-07:00"Professional" By Luca Turin<a href="http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/d80bd71b-b264-4db4-afd0-277884b93470/showarticle/6fcfbad9-298f-4873-bbe1-079b69891bea.aspx">"Professional" By Luca Turin</a><br /><br />When I was a young lad I used to admire older people with great experience, not so much because what they told me seemed useful or interesting, which it seldom did, but because I wondered what it must be like to be so used to things. And not just frightening, unexpected or merely difficult things: beauty, of all things, was to me the hardest one to get used to. It seemed to me that grown-ups could bravely face up to and judge the beauty of things very quickly and get it right whereas I struggled for weeks.<br /><br />For example, my parents listened to classical music all the time at home. When they played a new record and declared it wonderful, I felt as if I had been set a fresh, hard problem to solve. All the paintings, books and pieces of music that eventually made me a better person initially felt like bacalhau, nutritious but stiff as a plank. Chewing on Beethoven’s string trios took me years, and I am still soaking his late quartets in running water. Perfume was just as hard, of course, but not part of high culture and therefore never talked about.<br /><br />I remember my mother’s Diorama floating like an enigma in the air, its contradictory austere and lush facets demanding to be reconciled by an explanation that never came. But what would the explanation feel like ? There is a painting by Magritte, entitled Explanation, depicting a wine bottle, a carrot, and a wine bottle in the process of turning into a carrot. The half-bottle, half-carrot is properly the work of art, as in artificial (note to translator: Robin, is there a wordplay on kunst and kunstlich that would work ?).<br /><br />Maybe Diorama’s beauty lies only in the fact that you eventually, reluctantly, accept it as a whole. Conversely if it were not beautiful, carrot and bottle would never coalesce, no new form would have been created and you would have learnt nothing. I still think strangeness, novelty, and arduousness that softens into self-evidence with time are the attributes of the kind of beauty I was trying to understand as a child.<br /><br />There are other kinds: the sublime in which we play no part, for example, the beauty of mountain peaks at sunset or of the smell of roses; and the cute, the beauty of puppies, kittens and cheerleaders. Perfumery lives under constant threat from sublimity and cuteness: wonderful raw materials tempt one to minimalism, hence the endless proliferation of identical vetivers, incense etc. Cuteness, on the other hand, is a sort of artistic dwarfism, the creative equivalent of cooking entirely with “baby” vegetables.<br /><br />Lately perfumery cuteness has come either in a bleached-blonde style (fruity florals) or in a dark-haired version with a hint of dark fuzz on the upper lip (Coco Mademoiselle and its descent). Where is Athena with one blue eye and one brown? Where is cross-eyed Aphrodite? I, and all perfume lovers, need to get used to something new.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston.</span>CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469487257832594012.post-39233525176468550762010-03-01T02:05:00.000-08:002010-07-21T14:06:01.260-07:00"Opium" By Luca Turin<a href="http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/d80bd71b-b264-4db4-afd0-277884b93470/showarticle/eb4fcfb5-2369-461f-96ee-39ab28930851.aspx">"Opium" By Luca Turin</a><br /><br />Opium is 30 years old ! I make it 33, since it came out in 1977, but lying about your age is ok. On reflection, though, it seems unnecessary: Opium was born middle-aged, and all the better for it. From day one, it was the come-hither perfume of the tanned woman in furs who is beginning to look a great deal more beautiful than her husband. Naturally, young women loved it because it suggested a past that would take some time to explain.<br /><br />I remember vividly when I first smelled it. I was in London at the end of the dreary seventies, and a French girl, maybe 24 and deliciously named Josette, turned up to work in the fusty London university I was in. She had close-cropped hair and dark red lips, wore emerald-green velvet jeans and spoke in a husky voice that has become scarce since smoking went out of style. She was proof that glamour not only existed but had made alarming progress while I fussed with corduroy flares and snot-green cardigans.<br /><br />By an illuminating coincidence, Opium came out a few months before the launch of a very similar yet strikingly ineffectual fragrance called Cinnabar. Both referred to China, both used the same red color in the packaging. Cinnabar was composed by Bernard Chant, the man responsible for the fragrances that made Opium inevitable: Cabochard, Aramis, Aromatics Elixir. All these, though wonderfully rich and complex, played with a fallen-leaves palette from umber to deep brown.<br /><br />Opium wasn’t autumn, it was Christmas. Unforgettably vivid and saturated in color, it seemed to square the perfumery circle by being at once fresh, medicinal and sweet. Above all, it was scarily different. Chant and his collaborator Josephine Catapano had clearly been looking for Opium, but Jean-Louis Sieuzac found it. Cinnabar also gives the measure of another ingredient that made Opium great, one not to be found in the bottle but all around it: perfect art direction.<br /><br />The name, for a start, outrageous enough to get publicity, but not so much that you lose customers. The slogan was “Pour les femmes qui s’adonnent (give themselves over) à Yves Saint Laurent”. The women in the ads, though fully dressed, looked as if the great gay genius had figured out something better than sex. There were protestations all over the world, and the fragrance was banned in China and the Gulf States. The Chinese couldn’t afford it anyway, and Gulf customers simply went to Paris to buy it. Saint Laurent upped the ante in 2000 with a naked Sophie Dahl making love to Invisible Man, but the original was funnier and more apt.<br /><br />Opium had a stellar first decade. It then fell into disfavor in the nineties when people decided they wanted pale, thin, overexposed fragrances, which is like preferring a 2-bedroom flat to the Arc de Triomphe. Like it or not, Opium is a landmark that will outlast all who read this.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston.</span>CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469487257832594012.post-84195542825996416142010-02-01T02:04:00.000-08:002010-07-21T14:05:07.872-07:00"Schiff bases" By Luca Turin<a href="http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/d80bd71b-b264-4db4-afd0-277884b93470/showarticle/bf61f912-d690-4825-a84c-ea028a530aed.aspx">"Schiff bases" By Luca Turin</a><br /><br />There are plenty of big mysteries left in olfaction, but one of my favorites is a small one, so small in fact that nobody seems to regard it as interesting: Schiff bases. They are chemical compounds named after Hugo Schiff (1835-1915), a German-born chemist who emigrated to Italy and became Professor in Turin and Florence (try doing that today). Schiff bases are the reaction product of aldehydes and amines and contain an unusual arrangement of atoms, -C=N-. Depending on your point of view, they are either a godsend or a nightmare. The reader who has some knowledge of organic chemistry is probably already wondering why aldehydes would ever encounter amines inside a bottle of perfume.<br /><br />Aldehydes are everywhere since Chanel No. 5, but don’t amines smell fishy? Yes, all except one do, and there’s the first little mystery: methyl anthranilate. Draw the structure on a napkin, ask a rookie chemist to guess its smell, and she will probably say, “Harsh, fishy, aniline like.” Open a bottle and surprise her: American grape. Methyl anthranilate, an essential component of white floral compositions, is what made Narcisse Noir and l’Heure Bleue so wonderful. Anthranilate comes with a warning: mix it with aldehydes and after a day or two your perfume will go dark, your soap bar completely black, because the quantum mechanics of the -C=N- group are such that it absorbs light.<br /><br />That’s the nightmare. The godsend is that you can make Schiff bases between anthranilate and just about any aldehyde, and they have amazing olfactory properties. For a start, they go on forever and are tremendously powerful. The reason for this is supposed to be that they slowly fall apart into their components and release them into the air, since they are considered too big (more than 16 carbons) to have their own smell. There, however, lies another mystery: most Schiff bases smell different and much stronger than the sum of their parts. If you doubt this, get a bottle of Giorgio. Its canary-yellow color is due to a small dose of a Schiff base between anthranilate (grape) and the aldehyde helional (a fresh, pale metallic smell).<br /><br />Weld them together and you get the stuff of Giorgio, a prodigious, take-no-prisoners hybrid between fruit and iron that belongs in medieval legend. The perfumer Jean-Pierre Subrénat, who had a hand in Giorgio, told me that when the fragrance was composed in 1980 nobody thought that this small Beverly Hills firm would sell millions. Accordingly, they specified this then-new Schiff base of which only one barrel was in existence. When sales of Giorgio took off and the suppliers had to make more, they found to their horror that they could not recreate that particular smell for months while orders went unfilled. To this day nobody seems sure why this happened, but fragrance chemists seem to have steered clear of -C=N- bonds since.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston.</span>CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469487257832594012.post-26890685867001107562010-01-01T11:28:00.000-08:002010-07-21T11:35:34.027-07:00"Notes from the nose -- Tiare" By Luca Turin"<a href="http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/21b625ad-36bc-48ea-b615-1c30cd0b472d/showarticle/34043b48-9085-4dd4-8ef6-d73b0e3bb51c.aspx">Notes from the nose -- Tiare</a>" By Luca Turin<br /><br />It is common knowledge, at any rate in Italy, that the victim of a curse will never understand what is happening without help in the form of a messenger who says, “This is malocchio,” at which point what seemed like mere bad luck suddenly falls into a pattern. Curiously, I find this to be more true for happy events: in my experience, good fortune needs to be pointed out.<br /><br />I had that flash of recognition a week ago when I read, in the Los Angeles Times (Nov 29), the fragrance historian and taxonomist Michael Edwards say of niche fragrances that they had ushered in “a new golden age of perfume.” Many perfume lovers like myself have witnessed the disfigurement of classic fragrances, the rise of celebrity garbage and the unending plague of flankers, and we have become inconsolable wailers.<br /><br />True, niche fragrances were always good enough to dry your tears and make you smile, and they have been around since Jean-François Laporte started l’Artisan Parfumeur in 1978. But there was always something deliberately marginal about niche, either exotic (Lutens), dada (Etat Libre d’Orange) or minimalist (CdG), reactions to a classical mainstream that no longer needed knocking down. In other words we had plenty of Gauguin, Picabia and Reinhardt, but no more Botticelli and Vermeer, and certainly no Gerhard Richter.<br /><br />Few niche firms until recently took on classical fragrance on its own terms, though some came close: Lutens’s La Myrrhe, for example, is essentially Chanel No. 5 in a carnival mask, and MDCI’s Enlèvement au Sérail stands comparison with anything done in the last hundred years. But the perfumers behind these fragrances, Chris Sheldrake and Francis Kurkdjian, were moonlighting from big-project firms and had lavish technical backup. They were merely publishing confidentially a manuscript unsuitable for the majors.<br /><br />Coincidentally, I read Michael Edwards’ optimistic interview the day the postman brought Ormonde Jayne’s latest fragrance, Tiaré. This tiny London firm has always been modest in word and bold in deed, and it was clear from the start that Linda Pilkington’s ambition was to beat Guerlain at its own game, not invent a new one. Ormonde (Man and Woman) and Tolu are perfumes in the grand manner, with timeless grace, balance and complexity. Tiaré goes one further and takes on the most impregnably classical thing of all: the feminine citrus floral.<br /><br />For reference, this category includes such marvels as Caron’s Alpona, Diorella and Chanel’s Cristalle, i.e. what Diana the Huntress might wear on a big night. Tiaré is clearly modeled on Cristalle, with a haughty, silken freshness up top and a green, acidic, olive-oil fruitiness below. But Linda Pilkington does not know her place: Tiaré is better than its model, richer, more complicated, more interesting. The formula contains a lot of natural materials, smells like it costs a fortune, and at the time of writing OJ apparently only has enough of the ingredients to make 160 bottles. She may need more.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston. </span>CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469487257832594012.post-50218594551297771412009-12-01T02:02:00.000-08:002010-07-21T14:03:21.891-07:00"Cocktails" By Luca Turin<a href="http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/d80bd71b-b264-4db4-afd0-277884b93470/showarticle/b0e023c4-44dc-427f-9c94-aeaa9c595733.aspx">"Cocktails" By Luca Turin</a><br /><br />There is something dangerous about cocktails. For a start they have nothing to do with food, and certainly do not put you in the mood for it. They are the stuff of the fifties, of men in hats and raincoats hanging on to Manhattan lampposts on Friday night, unable to locate Grand Central, of cartoons involving the now-extinct pink elephant. Cocktails were always far too grown-up for me, like wearing a coat and scarf over a tuxedo or deftly slipping a tip, like a baton in a relay race, to the usher who shows you to your opera seat. This was until a recent Sunday brunch in a very good Boston restaurant called Craigie.<br /><br />The American brunch is a brilliant invention which, I have found, helps get me through my least favorite day of the week. I did not recognize the names on the list and ordered a Tavern Sparkler, which turned out to be a sensational spiced apple confection made with the Karlovy Vary speciality Becherovkà. It immediately put me in mind of a fragrance, Caron’s Anarchiste. My companion ordered a Cucumber Gimlet, and opined with a big smile that it was like drinking Chanel’s Cristalle. These two drinks were a revelation: as good as perfume, free of all the organic, nature-knows-best burden of wine, real works of art.<br /><br />Every cocktail on the list was a creation of the barman, a young man called Tom Schlesinger-Guidelli. We spoke to him after lunch and he explained that he had, so to speak, been born in a restaurant to a family of cooks and restaurateurs and had learned the trade on the job. A formative influence, apparently, was three years spent at Eastern Standard, a restaurant which he said had a good cocktail “program”, a term usually reserved for university courses of study.<br /><br />In structure, cocktails are like perfumes of the pre-war years, composed from a mixture of naturals (lime, orange water, whisky) and bases (vermouth, angostura, gin). They differ from fragrance in that the odorant materials must be reasonably water-soluble (when they are not they go cloudy like Pastis), with the added advantage that they will not linger in your mouth and nose and will not taste bitter the way fragrance does when accidentally ingested.<br /><br />What I hadn’t noticed was how far fine fragrance and cocktails have converged, indeed crossed each other’s line: the ever-popular fruity floral is essentially an undrinkable beverage, and the quality of the raw materials in a cocktail now far outstrips that of the average fragrance. In cocktails as in fragrance, the great classics are abstract: the Martini is Chypre, the Manhattan Chanel 5, the Gin and Tonic Pino Silvestre, the Margarita Chanel Pour Monsieur. This thought brought back a distant memory of an email I’d received two years ago from Damian Sim, a Singapore-based cocktail composer who let me know he had put together a bespoke mixture for, of all people, American Express. It is called Pure Platinum and contains kewra flower. Now I want to taste it.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston.</span>CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469487257832594012.post-44922369996356632052009-11-01T02:01:00.000-08:002010-07-21T14:02:05.192-07:00"Hyperosmia" By Luca Turin<a href="http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/d80bd71b-b264-4db4-afd0-277884b93470/showarticle/777b7093-bc38-4c68-b418-ccead7013925.aspx">"Hyperosmia" By Luca Turin</a><br /><br />We seem pleased with the way our senses work in everyday use, and you don’t often hear people dreaming of being able to see in the dark or hearing tiny sounds from miles away. Of course if they did, their wish could be granted immediately. Night vision goggles are available for a few hundred euros, and hearing aids or parabolic microphones for a few hundred more. Smell is another matter: lots of things around us seem written in magic ink that only dogs can see, and every one of us has wished at some point to be able to sniff a dropped scarf and run in the right direction to tell the owner you love her. But a smell in the air is made of matter, not light waves or sound waves, and you can’t multiply matter.<br /> <br />What you could do, in principle, is turn up the volume button inside our head. We know there must be one, because our smell acuity varies quite a bit from day to day. Imagine getting hold of it and setting it to full. I have experienced this, and it is wonderful. I once designed a lily-of-the-valley molecule called Lioral containing an atom of sulfur. It was smooth, powerful, had a pleasant sucked-silver-spoon angle to it reminiscent of helional and was much liked by perfumers. It took me a long while to realize it did something more than just smell. I remember coming up for supper from my home office where I had just been sniffing a new batch sent by our chemists, taking a sip of a cheap chardonnay and finding it as good as a Montrachet: powerful ,rich, deep and seemingly going on forever in a russet-apple and walnut style.<br /><br />A few weeks later we had some guests over and one was a former editor of a women’s magazine who declared herself indifferent to perfume. I decided to try an experiment, and gave her some of our Lioral to smell. She absent-mindedly waved the smelling strips under her nose for a few minutes, whereupon I handed her a strip of Mitsouko, a fragrance she had earlier dismissed as just so-so. Her reaction was gratifying: she started crying, looking at me fixedly through her tears and eventually said “Now I understand”.<br /><br />There may be other ways of doing this. A group of scientists at the University of Auburn, Alabama headed by the Russian-born polymath Vitaly Vodyanoy have recently discovered that metal nanoparticles made of zinc increase measured smell responses in rats by as much as fivefold. Remarkably, it has to be zinc: gold or platinum nanoparticles don’t work. The reason this happens is unclear, but Vodyanoy and his colleagues have found zinc nanoparticles everywhere in the body, so this may be a natural process. If it works on humans (do not try this at home) and if we could control it, we could at last walk the dog and discuss with it what news are floating in the evening air.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston.</span>CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469487257832594012.post-77744760489042100872009-10-01T01:59:00.000-07:002010-07-21T14:01:07.282-07:00"Designer Genes" By Luca Turin<a href="http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/d80bd71b-b264-4db4-afd0-277884b93470/showarticle/ed8118fc-f6ab-4889-99ec-d9926f8449d3.aspx">"Designer Genes" By Luca Turin</a><br /><br />The Second Law of thermodynamics stipulates that whenever you see your cup of café crème spontaneously separate into cream and black coffee, you must buy a lottery ticket. A more subtle omen of the End of Days for those who do not stare at coffee endlessly: you spray a fragrance on your wrist; it starts with a muted patchouli-sandalwood accord, gradually gets more floral as time goes on and wakes you up with a start at 2AM with a cymbal crash of citrus. Every perfumer and fragrance chemist I’ve met dreams of such an Apocalypse Eau Fraîche working in inverse time.<br /><br />One day, when we really understand olfaction, we will find out whether it is even possible. My guess is that a top note musk may be forever beyond reach. However, as CTO of a molecule design company, I once made an attempt at a drydown citrus which worked wonderfully for a time but died a dramatic death a few months later.<br /><br />Here’s what happened. What makes a molecule last long is mostly its weight. Adding a carbon (weight 12) usually doubles the time a molecule stays on your skin. Adding three would slow things down eightfold. What makes the problem interesting is that adding even one carbon usually changes the odor completely, never mind three. I and others had noticed, however, that replacing a double bond between carbons with a little carbon triangle called a cyclopropane leaves the odor reasonably unchanged. Armed with this idea and some clever methods for calculating odor, I tried to see whether other triangular arrangements would do better.<br /><br />A triangle of two carbons and oxygen, while stable and easy to make, gives everything a bright metallic smell. But to my surprise calculations said that replacing the oxygen with a sulfur (to give a triangle the chemists call a thiirane) would not change the smell and add fully 32 weight units, a touch short of three carbons.<br /><br />Dihydromyrcenol seemed a suitable candidate: very popular dry citrus-lime topnote, sold by the ton, nice carbon-carbon double bond just begging to be messed with, stable as a rock otherwise. We made the thiirane. To my delight it smelled very close indeed to the original, but went on forever. I took it to a trade show and showed it to two perfumer colleagues working for one of the big five. They declared it to be pure magic. We made a bit more and decided to show it at a meeting with one the largest firms in the business.<br /><br />The day came: ten perfumers, their boss and some technical staff sat around the table. I passed smelling strips. All but two of the perfumers loved it; the last two said it smelled of skunk, not lemon. What we had discovered was not just a long-lasting citrus, but a new genetic variation among humans: the ability to break open thiiranes into sulfides, the smell of skunk and rotten eggs. Still, eight out of ten perfumers were impressed.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston.</span>CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469487257832594012.post-84217161268529660592009-09-01T02:23:00.000-07:002010-07-21T14:26:10.183-07:00"In search of a lost smell" By Luca Turin"<a href="http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/d80bd71b-b264-4db4-afd0-277884b93470/showarticle/5d51cf12-587b-45cc-8ebf-18849ce7885c.aspx">In search of a lost smell</a>" By Luca Turin<br /><br />The French have a wonderful phrase for disturbing ideas that recur at long, random intervals and catch you unprepared each time: serpent de mer, sea monster. Monsters can be good news, as in Dino Buzzati’s short story about the colombre, a giant shark that relentlessly follows a sea captain. The captain, certain the shark wants to kill him, manages to elude the beast for a lifetime. At last, near death, he decides to face the monster.<br /><br />The colombre explains that what he wanted all along was to award him the Pearl of the Seas, which brings riches and love to its owner. The monster disappears forever into the depths; the captain dies. Some years ago, helped by the Genie in the Google, I embarked on a monster-clearing operation of my own. I tracked down a girl I had met once three decades earlier (no Pearl), obtained recordings of longed-for pieces of music (Pearl: Schumann’s Konzertstück for four horns), had a ring made to replace a lost one (lost the second too). Not surprisingly given my interests, there were instances of unfinished perfume business. One was getting hold of Nombre Noir. After years of waiting, two full bottles arrived independently the same day. The other serpent was, more mysteriously, an accord I first encountered in an unmarked, cork-stoppered aluminum bottle my stepfather brought back from India forty years ago.<br /><br />The smell was properly archangelical, at once searingly bright and darkly fresh, and seemed to swirl too fast for the mind to follow. The bottle was lost, that accord never surfaced again, and I could find nothing similar while snooping around in India or the Middle East. The first clue came from a near-empty bottle of Jean Carles’ Elle...Elle... found in a flea market. In the brief interval between buying it and the bottle being accidentally upended and emptied by an enthusiastic cleaner, I caught several fleeting glimpses of the Indian Deva but could not figure out what it was made of. Years later, I was asked to oversee a fragrance and decided to model it on Elle...Elle.... The great perfumer Guy Robert kindly agreed to help. Elle...Elle...? Easy: he phoned Jean Carles’ son, Marcel, and asked him for the formula. The two main materials were rose and chamomile; I rushed back to Fragonard and asked the lab to weigh me a chromatic series.<br /><br />There is a proportion at which the heavy sweetness of both materials, instead of adding up, magically cancels out and the perfumery equivalent of the biblical pillar of flame surges up before you. I smelled it endlessly until there was nothing left to understand. The monster still follows me, now smaller and friendlier. It recently reappeared in the form of a rose and chamomile shampoo made by EO. I now habitually shower in the company of a medium-sized creature of light.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston.</span>CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469487257832594012.post-54323069003290037412009-08-01T02:21:00.000-07:002010-07-21T14:23:14.380-07:00"At the dragon zoo" By Luca Turin<a href="http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/d80bd71b-b264-4db4-afd0-277884b93470/showarticle/3325d452-0514-443d-9bd3-adeed87c38c0.aspx">"At the dragon zoo"</a><br /><br />Airplanes are as large and loud as the dragons of yore. And, thanks to the imperfections of fuel distillation, they also smell highly evocative.<br /><br />By Luca Turin<br /><br />An airport is a zoo where fire-breathing dragons are fed and watered. When you come near, you can hear and smell the fearsome beasts long before you glimpse them, the warbling whistle of jet fans, the aromatic hot breath of jet fuel.<br /><br />Piston engines burn all the fuel they’re fed and just smell of smoke. Jet engines are sloppy until warm and spit out a lot of unburned fuel at idle, hence the smell. If distillation of petroleum were perfect, kerosene would be made up only of heavy molecules, and would have almost no smell. But no one can afford perfumery-grade stills for mere fuel, so kerosene contains the petroleum equivalent of cognac, a mixture of indenes, tetralins and alkylbenzenes.<br /><br />For those born just after the war, that smell recalls the epic time, roughly 1959, when dragons were finally domesticated and became beasts of burden: the effete Comet, the manly 707, the gorgeous Caravelle.<br /><br />If you happen to be fond of dragon zoos, smaller is usually better: you can come closer to the animals, almost pet them through the fence. My favourite was the lovely and very decrepit museum of the Fuerza Aérea Argentina. It lived at the south end of Jorge Newbery airport in Buenos Aires, in a little triangle of land stuck between a taxiway and the main coastal road north of the city.<br /><br />Big jets taxiing for take-off swept past so close you could read the markings on the tires. Old aircraft were scattered among the bushes, with the battered look of old saucepans. A small, low building housed relics of the air force. One room was full of blue-white-blue Argentinian flags, each with a sun embroidered in heavy gold thread at the centre. Each sun had a face, and each face was different, mostly melancholy, occasionally angry, as if the country itself had moods.<br /><br />A second room housed aircraft engines, some cut open to reveal their shiny, now immovable innards, with the cut metal painted red like living flesh.<br /><br />A third room housed the centrepiece of the museum, a glass case shaped like a coffin with bevelled crystal windows on all faces, containing a mangled mass of wooden struts, brass piping and leather straps, with the accessible parts buffed up to a high sheen. Ribbons in the national colours connected various parts of this unrecognisable object to little plaques affixed inside the crystal panes. One said "carburettor", another said "altimeter".<br /><br />This turned out to be all that was left of an aircraft that had attempted to pass the Andes at their lowest point in the early 1920s and found that the lowest point was higher than it could go. The passion, the tragedy and the loneliness of early flight gripped you by the throat.<br /><br />Stepping out into the sun, I was nearly blown over by the fragrant blast of a Boeing 737 turning from the taxiway to line up for take-off. I have just checked on Google Earth. The museum is gone but you can still see the shadows of the aircraft in the grass, no doubt rippling docilely when dragons growl.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston.</span>CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469487257832594012.post-58857858792059568552009-07-01T02:20:00.000-07:002010-07-21T14:21:23.688-07:00"One-way functions" By Luca Turin<a href="http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/d80bd71b-b264-4db4-afd0-277884b93470/showarticle/0f5e8406-c936-47b5-9751-f24b58e328e5.aspx">"One-way functions" By Luca Turin</a><br /><br />I have never gone to perfume school, and it is sadly too late for me to do so, but I can imagine how the student perfumer feels when first given access to the full palette of raw materials. When I was nine years old, I used to sit at a Bechstein concert grand that belonged to family friends and, as the British say, “tickle the ivories”. Even simple chords were so beautiful, especially with the sustain pedal held down, that it was easy to understand why sung polyphony was the greatest hit for centuries. But the strange thing was how different the component notes of a chord were from the chord itself, how mysterious the added magic of playing them together. A chord never felt like the sum of its parts, some other operation seemed to be at work.<br /><br />We now know that the perception of harmonies involves the comparison and matching of all the frequencies contained in each of the notes, such that the analysis our brain performs so willingly is more akin to the product of several Fourier transforms, one for each note. Such operations are not easily invertible: to dissect a complex chord into its component notes requires practice, and can be near-impossible when tricks are played with timbre: when Egberto Gismonti and Mauro Senise play a fast tune called Lôro on piano and flute in exact unison it sounds for all the world like a new instrument, a concert grand made of Baccarat crystal. Listen to 30 seconds of it on iTunes, and I am sure you’ll agree that no computer would give the correct answer.<br /><br /> Perfumery chords are no different: the classic bergamot-cistus-oakmoss of chypre is, once invented, as self-evident and capacious as perspective drawing. It’s as if the citrus-sweet-bitter were orthogonal axes of an invisible space, and once you had made them appear into thin air you could then put in walls and floors, hang paintings, slide sofas, move in and have a party. Even binary accords can have non-invertible magic. The vetiver-vanilla accord, once explained, falls to the floor with a loud crash and is very hard to put together.<br /><br />If someone you know loves Habanita, don’t tell them how it’s done. Of course these days professionals use gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to analyze the competition and replicate it. It is easy with synthetics and harder but still doable with naturals. But how did they copy fragrances in the old days? An old perfumer told me that you could do it by identifying one raw material, smelling it pure to desensitize your nose, smelling the original mix again from which that one would now be “missing”, identifying another etc.<br /><br />Such was the power of this chemical cryptography, however, that until recently, merely splitting the formula in half and never giving a single person access to all of it would guarantee its unbreakability. This is the exact equivalent of public-key cryptography: Guerlain publishes the product of two large primes, and only Jean-Paul knows both numbers. The rest of us smell a 128-digit marvel.CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469487257832594012.post-80625520008394274162009-06-01T02:19:00.000-07:002010-07-21T14:20:34.952-07:00"Magic Moments" By Luca Turin<a href="http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/d80bd71b-b264-4db4-afd0-277884b93470/showarticle/eba4acb6-c4f7-4d3f-8ab0-3173e9d739f7.aspx">"Magic Moments" By Luca Turin</a><br /><br />One of the many things I love about the US is the majestic size of home appliances: to European eyes, US washing machines and driers belong to a friendly race of giants and serve as a reminder that space is always a luxury, even if you merely intend to fill it with dirty laundry. These large creatures inhabit house basements, open-plan spaces typically full of obsolete children’s toys, gardening equipment, things bought in haste and repented at leisure and, where I live at least, snow-clearing equipment ready for the next time you wake up and can no longer see your car parked in front.<br /><br />As you walk past the curiously flimsy houses Americans live in, meant to last no more than one lifetime, extractor fans at street level breathe powerful blasts of laundry soap and fabric conditioner across your face. These smells suddenly make you feel you’re no longer outdoors, but in a mysterious room the size of a city. The combination of crudeness and volume tugs at your heart, like a snatch of melody played too loud by a passing car. Appliance breath has the poetic beauty of objects the wrong size, like Claes Oldenburg‘s giant telephone, three-story tall half-eaten apples and truck-sized clothespin. These fragrances are clearly not meant to be smelled at this magnification, and seem rough and hairy like newsprint seen in a microscope.<br /><br /> When displayed at the correct, legible size, fragrance in soap and conditioner is meant to elicit loyalty. People ultimately choose a brand because they think April Fresh or Summer Pasture smells great. It does not do so by accident. Soap manufacturers are the political parties of perfumery: a few percent change in market share is a very big win. Thousands of volunteer testers take home small test packets of proposed new fragrance compositions, and diligently fill questionnaires at critical points: after opening the washer door, while hanging the clothes to dry, and while folding them. These time points are known in the trade, without the slightest irony, as “magic moments”. Despite the very low cost of these compositions, this is where the money is made in perfumery.<br /><br />A week’s worth of Tide fragrance oil is probably worth ten years of Patou’s turnover, yet every penny spent by soap makers on fragrance compositions is scrutinized as if it were a gold sovereign. Does it have to be so? Why doesn’t Guerlain make a luxury fabric softener? Probably because we wouldn’t buy it. Objects too have their castes, and we seem to like it that way: telephones must do a poor job of reproducing the human voice, burgers should be greasy, car dashboards should be plastic pretending to be leather, washing products should smell pleasant but obedient, unadorned—in one word, deferential. To borrow a Victorian phrase, they should know their place, below stairs.CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469487257832594012.post-26963054454733922092009-05-01T02:15:00.000-07:002010-07-21T14:19:45.199-07:00"Millefleurs" By Luca Turin<a href="http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/d80bd71b-b264-4db4-afd0-277884b93470/showarticle/e541f2dc-ca2c-4a21-ad10-89090945efed.aspx">"Millefleurs" By Luca Turin</a><br /><br />A few weeks ago I was given a tour of the Henkel plant in Krefeld, a sleepy little town near Düsseldorf. Henkel is the largest German soapmaker and stands alone among its peers in having had a molecule discovery department that, in the eighties, famously stole a march on Firmenich and made Henkel’s very own Ambroxan.<br /><br />The Krefeld site is a jumble of buildings, mostly lovely century-old brickwork with ample courtyards. The place is quiet, with few people visible and very little smell in the air. The plant manager showed me around, and was justifiably proud of his charge. He got a doctorate in process control and was immediately given by Henkel a chance to put company money where his mouth was, with impressive results: the place seemed to hum more smoothly than any I have seen.<br /><br />We started at the beginning, where the drums of smelly stuff come in. On the principle of “trust is good, control is better” one in ten drums is sampled from the bottom (not-so clever suppliers sometimes put a layer of good stuff on top) and sent for analysis. The drums are then loaded into one of 700 vats of differing sizes from which they can be automatically dispensed under computer control to make perfumery mixes ranging from about a pint to a couple of tons.<br /><br />This, among other things, means 700 stainless steel pipes running from room to room, each the size of a tennis court, while making right-angle turns right, left, up and down in formation. Thousands of valves direct the flow, and extraordinary scales weigh bathtubs full of fragrance to sub-gram precision. Everytime we moved from one building to another, giant vertical sliding doors shot up before us with a speed that made me feel important. I was taken to a room kept at the temperature of a hot day in Java, where the resinoids are kept to make sure they flow when needed. It felt like a hothouse in a zoo, as if those exotic ingredients might otherwise feel homesick. <br /><br />The process is amazingly error-free and efficient: virtually the only surplus comes from the half-litre bottles of compositions that perfumers sample and then discard, because the automatic mixer cannot make a batch smaller than that. What happens to the leftovers? They get mixed into a big vat, thirty tons each year, and sold under the elegantly cynical name of Millefleurs. I asked to smell it and was offered smelling strips dipped in the last four batches, each randomly different. They smelled better than many things made on purpose.<br /><br />Every company has its own Millefleurs, and each apparently has a house style. Who buys the stuff? North African soap makers, who pay € 1.50 per kg for it, i.e. at least twenty times cheaper than the cheapest proper fragrance. Henkel tried to up the price to € 1.80 recently and found no takers. It is a wonderful to think that the perfumery product most closely approaching an unrepeatable limited edition is also the cheapest.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><span style="font-weight:bold;">Leserbriefe:<br />Zu Duftnote -- Millefleurs - NZZ-Folio Do it yourself (05/09)</span><br />Da haben sich mir doch, eigentlich zum ersten mal, seit ich das nzz folio lese, die nackenhaare gesträubt. in dem artikel steht, dass "krefeld eine verschlafenen kleinstadt nahe düsseldorf" sei! daran richtig ist nur die nähe zu düsseldorf, krefeld ist aber nicht verschlafen und auch keine kleinstadt: krefeld hat ca. 240'000 einwohner ! (und beherbergt, nebenbei bemerkt, den deutschen eishockeymeister von 2003) die henkel-seifen-fabrik liegt im uerdinger industrie-/hafengebiet, dass dort dort geschlafen wird, kann ich mir auch nicht vorstellen. wie kann luca turin nur so daneben greifen?<br />Reinhard Wagener, Krefeld</span>CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469487257832594012.post-41574296508891762182009-04-01T02:14:00.000-07:002010-07-21T14:15:36.552-07:00"No Benefits" By Luca Turin<a href="http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/d80bd71b-b264-4db4-afd0-277884b93470/showarticle/072e611a-7b57-4112-996e-58d4d4ce245b.aspx">"No Benefits" By Luca Turin</a><br /><br />Perfumery, a hundred-year-old art, has taken a long time dying, but on January 1, 2010 it will be officially dead. On that date, amendment 43 by IFRA, the international fragrance association, will take effect, and all perfumes on the market, old, young, fine fragrance or shampoo, must follow its guidelines or be in breach of the law in the EU. Among the many disasters that will befall fine fragrance, let me pick an emblematic one: oakmoss. This material is essential to perfumery and especially to the chypre category, including Mitsouko and hundreds of others. From 2010 it will be replaced by things which do not smell like oakmoss. Why? Because it contains some things which sometimes cause rashes in some people. The death blow to oakmoss was dealt by an environmental chemist called Suresh Chandra Rastogi, working in Denmark. He and colleagues identified two molecules, atranol and chloroatranol, as particularly powerful sensitizers.<br /><br />One of the subcommittees of the SCCP (Scientific Committee on Consumer Products) in the EU then looked at the evidence and decided to set very low maximum levels of these two compounds. Dr Rastogi was a member of this committee. In the civilized world this might be considered a conflict of interest, but in the nebulous world of EU policymaking it is considered due diligence. Why, you ask, does that worry me? Aren’t scientists impeccably objective? I am not disputing the veracity of Dr Rastogi’s research, though it makes mind-numbingly dull reading. But consider this: you discover some real but minor problem in a fragrance ingredient. Nice work, and you can tell your family when you get home. But if an EU committee bans the thing, that enshrines you as the Man Who Saved the World From Hideous Disfigurement by Oakmoss. In environmental science as in tabloid journalism there’s no story till the plane crashes. In another scientific paper titled “The Composition of fragrances is changing” Dr Rastogi analyses old and new perfumes and notes that his work is having an effect.<br /><br />It now seems fragrance is to be composed not by perfumers, but by an EU committee of experts. What can be done to resist this? There is no point questioning the evidence for and against, or the logic of the EU decision, and here’s why: fragrance has no demonstrable benefit other than beauty. Beauty cannot be measured by environmental chemists, or, to be fair, by any other kind. In the case of medicines, you balance the positive against the negative and call the negative “side-effects”. When there is no perceived benefit, any risk is unacceptable, much as dividing anything by zero gives you infinity. By all means change the scents of skin creams and shampoos, but fine fragrance is another matter. For real perfumery I see only one, beautifully simple solution: Guerlain, who will stand to lose most from all this, must take the lead and a) bravely restore Mitsouko to its pre-reformulation glory (no point in messing around) and b) add a small label that says DO NOT SPRAY ON SKIN.CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469487257832594012.post-25662508877272576642009-03-01T02:14:00.000-08:002010-07-21T14:14:47.684-07:00"Passionfruit" By Luca Turin<a href="http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/d80bd71b-b264-4db4-afd0-277884b93470/showarticle/c04a75ed-f146-43ea-bba0-188f770c8404.aspx">"Passionfruit" By Luca Turin</a><br /><br />They say Passiflora is a mild hallucinogen, which may explain why the South American missionaries who “discovered” the plant saw in it a crown of thorns, five stamens representing the five wounds of Christ, five petals and five sepals the ten apostles (excluding, handily, Judas and Peter) and three stigmas for the nails on the cross. But the stoned padres ignored a far more cogent proof of the existence of god close by. I write this from Thailand, while tasting passionfruit in full glory. What passes for it in Europe is usually a mean, shrunken shell containing a spoonful of grey snot that tastes like cheap fruit cocktail. In Thailand a bag of passionfruit (1 euro) fills the room with a fragrance that all the world’s perfumers would give their last quarter-ounce of vintage Iris Gris for.<br /><br />The taste is unusually true to the smell, merely stronger, parfum to the smell’s eau de toilette. In the mouth the fruit, like a perfect Sauternes, has tremendous acidity to counterbalance the lushness of the flavor. But smell a Sauternes in the glass and you’d never know it was acid: sour is a taste, not a smell. Amazingly, as if it bestowed upon us an extra sense, passionfruit manages to smell sour. Fruit have personalities: peaches are generous, apples hale, pears aristocratic, apricots gentle, mangos grand, lychees peaceable, pineapple glitzy. Passionfruit is the impossibly pretty joker in the pack, perhaps the only fruit worthy of the strange phrase tutti frutti.<br /><br /> I imagine flavor chemists, on the walls of their student rooms, have posters of scantily clad papayas instead of Salma Hayek and Eva Mendes. Since 1977 and the identification of a sulfur-containing molecule called Oxane, the code of passionfruit has been partially cracked. Oxane is now used and abused in all tropical fruit fragrances and flavors. It is sensationally powerful and therefore cheap: a chemist colleague once told me that 100 grams accidentally spilled in the factory drains caused the surrounding English countryside to smell of the tropics for days. But, just as tying a sarong round your waist won’t turn Basel into Bali, Oxane is only part of the answer.<br /><br />A thorough analysis of the molecules emitted by passionfruit done by the great firm of Haarmann and Reimer in 1998 revealed 180 different molecules never before seen, 47 of which are sulfur compounds, with smells ranging from rotten cabbage to blocked drains. The proximity of beauty to ugliness is never clearer than in tropical fruit. Perhaps because they have to compete with powerful smells of decay for the attention of birds, tropical fruit have decided to play dirty. Adding tiny amounts of rot on an otherwise conventional fruity smell is as invigorating as finding out that a theoretical physicist colleague was once a stripper. Try this at home: buy some sulfurous kala namak salt from an Indian shop, sprinkle it on tinned fruit salad, and send me a postcard from wherever you find yourself.CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469487257832594012.post-13491003736345653002009-02-01T02:12:00.000-08:002010-07-21T14:13:05.574-07:00"Celebrity" By Luca Turin<a href="http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/d80bd71b-b264-4db4-afd0-277884b93470/showarticle/bfe64bfc-d68c-48bc-8ff3-3f98e64bf205.aspx">"Celebrity" By Luca Turin</a><br /><br />Perhaps more as a wishful thought than a sober one, I have so far taken the view that celebrity fragrances could be no worse than average, which is to say pretty bad. I was shocked to find out recently that I was wrong: a UK tabloid journalist arranged a smelling session of all the latest ones, and it was instructive to smell them one after the other. They were uniformly awful, cynically cheap compositions in ugly packaging, the saddest, cheesiest objects this side of the girl’s section in a toy store. They were also unusually bad value for money: twenty euros’ worth of celebrity fragrance gets you a fabric softener stink, while twice the money gets you the smallest-size Guerlain, a leap equivalent to going from The Eagles to Beethoven.<br /><br />In the UK at least, celebrity fragrances have simply become as bad as any fragrance ever gets. But then, celebrities themselves have taken a turn for the worse. I have never understood the educated surprise at the fame of athletes, actors and explorers, since it dates back to antiquity and by now we should have gotten used to it. What is new and remarkable is that celebrity has become sexually transmissible, as if some spirochaete were responsible. We are now dealing with the wives, and in some cases the husbands of famous people: footballers have girlfriends, the girlfriends have names, the names become brands and pretty soon some thirteen-year-old girl in Sunderland steals two tenners from her mother’s purse to smell terrible.<br /><br /> But on reflection, that’s not new either. In some ways the famous now embody all the absurd eminence of aristocracy: complete independence from talent, transmissibility by name, elevation by marriage, ready convertibility of prestige into cash, automatic admittance to the demi-monde. They trade the elusive quality of being, as opposed to merely having. The rich want fame, and the famous want cash. It is arguably more common to be rich and obscure than poor and famous, and in any event fame can be converted into money more easily than the other way around: consider what Paris Hilton had to endure to go from stinking rich to stinking famous. <br /><br />After all, if Prince Charles makes Duchy Originals biscuits, why should Wayne Rooney’s girlfriend not make a fragrance? And when you smell them all and discover that the only ones that don’t make you retch are by Jennifer Lopez and Sarah Jessica Parker, is that not a reflection of the fact that the US is charmingly middle class, with stars that can act, sing and dance, that care about their image and oversee their products?<br /><br />On this side of the ocean, the celebrities do not concern themselves with such trivia: they are content to merely exist, and for little pieces of their lifestyle to be traded like fake relics of the saints. When the tabloid wrote up the piece, they came back to me to ask what I thought of No. 5. They seemed to think it was Nicole Kidman’s celebrity fragrance. Mademoiselle Chanel would be amused.CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469487257832594012.post-3905402066379668912009-01-01T02:11:00.000-08:002010-07-21T14:12:15.290-07:00"Purification" By Luca Turin<a href="http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/d80bd71b-b264-4db4-afd0-277884b93470/showarticle/429a9026-e59b-410d-bcd4-528a2e8cc532.aspx">"Purification" By Luca Turin</a><br /><br />The idea that adding something can take something away is magic. Air fresheners rely on this, for example in toilets where bad smells in a small space will be somehow subtracted by good smells coming from a spray can with a picture of the Alps on it. It works with spirits, i.e. metaphysical farts, as well. My mother lived in a haunted flat for a while, where strange noises, sensations and moved objects made her life miserable until she used a Lampe Berger, that wonderful flameless burner invented a century ago, and filled it with a Patricia de Nicolai scent. Things calmed down instantly.<br /><br />This is the rationale behind Papier d’Arménie, blotting paper steeped in benzoin resin you find in the form of green and yellow booklets in French Tabacs. The booklet says “burn it in hotel rooms where unclean individuals have sojourned before you”, a clearly magical instruction. But to paraphrase Arthur C Clarke, any magic will sooner or later will become indistinguishable from technology.<br /><br />An improvement on Papier d’Arménie, closer to real effectiveness, is Ozium, a mysterious fluid in a striped spray can of pure ‘fifties design, three shades of light blue, with the cursive inscription “Glycolized”. According to Ozium’s makers “Each use will release a pleasant fragrance that kills odor-causing bacteria and converts smoke particles into clean, fresh air”. We are still close to magic, but in my experience Ozium works rather well.<br /><br />Then, without much fuss, after centuries of rituals there came technology. Procter and Gamble’s Febreze contains cyclodextrins, cup-shaped molecules that actually attach to odors. Oddly, as a sort of homage to past magic, P&G still puts fragrance in it, which must complicate things. The stuff works so well guys in the US spray their clothes with it instead of washing them, a fine example of unintended consequences of both magic and technology.CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469487257832594012.post-67465902483241582922008-12-01T01:59:00.000-08:002010-07-21T13:59:55.728-07:00"Moving parts" By Luca Turin<a href="http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/d80bd71b-b264-4db4-afd0-277884b93470/showarticle/67c52bfe-fd49-4303-b2b0-b6da72c1d8e9.aspx">"Moving parts" By Luca Turin</a><br /><br />Some years ago, in collaboration with a strange and charming guy who appeared in my office one day and later turned out to be a fantasist, I became interested in the possibility of developing an electronically controlled perfume spray. The idea was to use inkjet technology to spray fragrance rather than color. The cartridge would hold four different fragrance bases and spray them in different proportions on your skin according to the software settings. These could in turn follow the time of day, or your mood, or the seasons. The whole thing would fit in the palm of your hand and look like something you’d found in the duty-free of the Starship Enterprise.<br /><br />Considering how inept we were, the idea went remarkably far: we met engineers from the admirable firm of Hewlett Packard at Chicago O’Hare airport, we saw people from Estée Lauder, Avon, the Body Shop, and we got a lot of technical help from what was then Quest International. At one point Christopher Sheldrake split up one of his fragrances (Tocadilly, if my memory serves me) for me to fill empty inkjet cartridges provided by HP and print invisible fragrance squares onto a white sheet of A4. It worked, and could no doubt have been developed into a workable, possibly desirable, maybe even successful device.<br /><br />But it didn’t, and the reasons are interesting. Everyone hated this thing. Perfumers didn’t like the notion that anyone should be able to adjust their compositions. Executives at beauty firms, chiefly women, hated batteries being included. Though we tried to make the thing look like perfume rather than a GPS it was still a gadget, and ultimately, electrical devices are boy stuff. The notion of a fragrance player made by Sony in which fragrance would be software was anathema to image-obsessed perfume firms.<br /><br />Conversely, technology firms were wary of the fickle world of fashion. What is remarkable is that clever devices are now abundant in plug-in room smells, piezoelectric sprays with little fans, wax CDs heated by a laser and much else, while the fine fragrance end still sticks to the archaic candle, with all its technical limitations. This at a time when every woman walks down the street speaking into a device with more computing power than the first IBM 360. I think times may be ready to change: one of these days Chanel will team up with Nokia, ask Philippe Starck to design the Zero and sell plug-ins of 5, 18, 19, 22 and other integers.CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469487257832594012.post-52194065160592916952008-11-01T01:58:00.000-07:002010-07-21T13:59:07.587-07:00"Anthropine" By Luca Turin<a href="http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/d80bd71b-b264-4db4-afd0-277884b93470/showarticle/2ba960f2-d711-4cd0-b146-c59aee0e7236.aspx">"Anthropine" By Luca Turin</a><br /><br />Some ideas are like swiss army knives: they do no single thing really well, but the attraction of having both a large toothpick and tiny axe to hand at all times proves irresistible. A few weeks ago I received a mysterious email from a homeopath near Karlsruhe. It drew my attention to a thing called Anthropine, which comes in small bottles with a label bearing the portrait of a bearded, late nineteenth-century man wearing the sort of oval glasses we now associate with forgotten operas, beef extract and prime numbers.<br /><br />Anthropine turns out to be a army-knife hybrid of pheromones and homeopathy. The man with the glasses is called Gustav Jaeger, and he made a fortune by producing high-quality woolen clothes. His firm was seized from him in reparation by the Treaty of Versailles and survives to this day in the UK, still bearing his name. He was also Professor of zoology, histology, anthropology, physiology and microscopy at the university of Stuttgart. Jaeger was interested in wool and hair, and in particular in their ability to retain odors, familiar to smokers and adulterous spouses. He became convinced that wool clothes hung on to airborne messengers emitted by the wearers when in different moods, and that clothes worn by, say, a happy person might be of medical use in curing depression.<br /><br />This is where homeopathy comes in: its axiom is that the less active principle you put in, the more potent it gets. This delusional notion (don’t bother to e-mail me if you disagree, or if you do please remember to dilute one part anger in a trillion parts sugar) has one huge advantage: a little goes a hell of a long way. Jaeger took small amounts of hair, diluted it vastly and made little globules.<br /><br />At one point 23 different kinds of Anthropine globules were in production, arising variously from small samples of hair taken from the athlete Fritz Kapernick (Anthropine No.2, used for shortness of breath), an unnamed blonde virgin (No. 7 “exhilarating and invigorating”), and Franz Liszt (No.16, for stiff finger joints). Today, you can send a sample of your own hair to the makers of Anthropine and get globules back. What little is left of my hair could considerably improve the human condition: several women have reported being cured of an expensive and antisocial fondness for Givenchy’s Amarige after only one dose.CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469487257832594012.post-52961298975159734002008-10-01T01:44:00.000-07:002010-07-21T13:57:51.007-07:00"Real Gardenia" By Luca Turin<a href="http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/d80bd71b-b264-4db4-afd0-277884b93470/showarticle/5f3113f9-f0d8-45b3-9b3c-bb9447c66840.aspx">"Real Gardenia" By Luca Turin</a><br /><br />According to perfumery historian Octavian Coifan (look up his blog, there’s nothing the guy doesn’t know or won’t soon find out) real gardenia absolutes made by flowers, not chemists, were once available at huge cost. None has been seen since 1938, which is chronologically neat, because exactly seventy years later a gardenia oil has reappeared. It comes from a farm in Fusagasugà, Colombia, 48 km due southwest of Bogotà as the hummingbird flies. I became aware of its existence thanks to Trygve Harris who runs Enfleurage, a small New York City outfit specializing in top-notch essential oils.<br /><br />Unlike many perfumery luminaries who claim to scour the world for exotic essences but never set foot outside Paris’s périphérique, Ms Harris really does ferret out extraordinary things from remote corners of the planet. She sent me a ml. of the gardenia oil, and a teaspoonful of the butter. The method by which these marvels were obtained is novel: an enfleurage in cold palm oil (there’s progress for you, classic enfleurage used pig suet exposed to vapors from the flowers). The fragrance oil is then extracted into alcohol and vacuum-distilled. The idea of this and all other low-temperature methods is to treat the flowers gently and capture the smell without loss or damage.<br /><br />I’ll admit one of the few things I am cynical about is gardenia: I’ve smelled too many, from Chanel’s eponymous mess to Guerlain’s cruel joke, that smelled nothing like the real thing. Until proven innocent, I regard all “gardenias” as I do footprints of the Snowman, engines that run on vacuum energy or good wines from Savoie. When I put this one on the back of my hand, I was ready to vent my spleen yet again. For a few seconds, the oil had me puzzled, with an intense herbaceous topnote that my daughter would have called pasta, i.e. thyme and laurel.<br /><br />Just as I was about to start griping, the most stunning gardenia hologram materialized before me, all present and correct, from bouquet de provence via tuberose to the famous mushroom note that makes gardenia so different from other white flowers. My next thought was unworthy of a university graduate and intermittently rational being. I know Darwin was right, I know creationists are wrong, I know everything beautiful in nature is there because of some screwup long ago. Yet when I smell gardenias, I hear a dry, Cambridge high-table voice that says: “You don’t seriously think this is an accident, do you?”.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><span style="font-weight:bold;">Leserbriefe:<br />Zu Duftnote -- Real Gardenia - NZZ-Folio Gratis (10/08)</span><br />Ich lese die Duftnote jeden Monat mit grösstem Vergnügen. Nicht nur, weil ich ein Parfumfan bin, sondern auch, weil Luca Turin so brillant und witzig schreibt. Die Kolumne über die Gardenie war wieder einmal eine echte Trouvaille.<br />M. Reber, per E-Mail</span>CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469487257832594012.post-91692340871765595052008-09-01T01:40:00.000-07:002010-07-21T13:40:58.125-07:00"Duftnote -- Two stinks" By Luca Turin<a href="http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/d80bd71b-b264-4db4-afd0-277884b93470/showarticle/9d01371b-4d9c-4683-8e20-af8124c6e813.aspx">"Duftnote -- Two stinks" By Luca Turin</a><br /><br />The Stazione Zoologica in Naples is one of my favorite places on earth. A solid, gracious 1872 building nestled among the trees of the seafront gardens in the heart of town, it looks like a provincial railway station transported by angels to a place with no rails. It was the first of its kind, imitated the world over to provide an excuse for scientists to work through the holidays. It is known locally as the Aquarium and houses local fauna bathed in natural light, unlike the garish nightclub for fish up the coast in Monaco.<br /><br />I fell in love with it in 1974, when I went there for a few weeks as a very junior assistant to the great John Z Young. My job was to train octopus to do complex tasks, like recognize shapes dangled in their aquaria or count the grooves in perspex balls. The intelligence of octopus is not widely appreciated, partly because they have little chance to display it when diced in a seafood salad, partly because we tend to think of invertebrates as lower forms of life. But think they do, astonishingly well when in pristine shape. Professor Young used to take out chunks of their brains to figure out which did what. Even when severely damaged, the hologram inside their heads was still readable and they performed valiantly, though more slowly, in all the tests. Sometimes one of these poor creatures would die, and take revenge on us (my other job was to clean the tanks) by producing the most prodigiously bad smell in the world, a stench so revoltingly vile that it would keep us retching for minutes afterwards.<br /><br />Years later I came back, this time given a little lab to play in, shared with two distinguished foreign scientists. The octopus were gone. We were unpacking our equipment when the Director of the station came to greet us. One of us asked where the store of clean seawater was to be found. We did not know this, but the Stazione had at great expense installed two pipes out to sea to pump it in from the depths. Seawater was now on tap, and with a proud flourish and a smile the director opened one of the taps, which had never been used. For an interminable minute, out hissed and spluttered a mile-long slug of pestilential gas interspersed with random bits of brown gunk, filling the room with a very familiar smell. By the time clear water came, we were all on the terrace retching. There must have been laughter in octopus heaven.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Luca Turin ist Forschungsleiter bei Flexitral Inc.; er lebt in London.</span>CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7469487257832594012.post-77633065658363730312008-08-01T01:39:00.000-07:002010-07-21T13:40:12.882-07:00"Jasmin et Cigarette" By Luca Turin<a href="http://www.nzzfolio.ch/www/d80bd71b-b264-4db4-afd0-277884b93470/showarticle/5fcd320f-dd3d-483c-ba5a-c4a695646b7d.aspx">"Jasmin et Cigarette" By Luca Turin</a><br /><br />Sitting at the bus stop one sunny, quiet morning three weeks ago, I noticed an elderly lady next to me, far too crisply dressed for the shabby neighborhood and smoking a cigarette held very close to the tips of her fingers , her hand arched beyond flat, as in fifties ads. She was wearing a houndstooth jacket and a sweet, powdery, grown-up perfume which could have been the old Dioressence. A breeze suddenly mixed the plume from her cigarette with the fragrance and made me realize how much I missed smoke in public places. Now it is gone, we can see that smoke was the speech of smell, exhaled with every word. It was the olfactory equivalent of a group conversation which you could chose to listen to or treat as noise. It said you were in company, and could speak (or wear perfume) frankly to someone next to you without being overheard. Walk into a pub these days and the clear air feels oddly silent. Any smell of food or fragrance stands naked and precise, like a medical photograph.<br /><br />Filtering out detail softens the edges of things and focuses our mind on structure, on melody, on the essential. They pipe white noise into open-plan offices so that people do not feel exposed. Painters stand back and blink when looking at a work in progress. The tinkle of glasses in jazz clubs never got in the way of the music. But it was more than that. Some fragrances from that period seem to have been designed with smoke in mind to be mixed at the time of use, one half of some ambient gin and tonic. It was as if the composed smell needed an audience: perfume supplied the music, smoke the crowd noises. This mysterious love affair between speech and music is what sends a shiver down your spine when in a movie the soundtrack fades into a conversation.<br /><br />It is perhaps no accident that some of the greatest perfumers alive are dedicated smokers. You can see them in the street in the fragrance district of midtown Manhattan, smelling strips in one hand, cigarette in the other, watching a crew dig up the road. I have always believed that smoke helped their art. To be sure, nobody is going to much miss emphysema and lung cancer, and the ritual post-coital cigarette must be on its way out (what replaces it?). But the surest sign of a new era comes from a young perfumer working for Etat Libre d’Orange, Antoine Maisondieu. He has composed a fragrance that addresses the problem: Jasmin et Cigarette.CMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17774940723691813044noreply@blogger.com0