"Professional" By Luca Turin
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.
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.
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 ?).
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.
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.
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.
Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston.
April 1, 2010
March 1, 2010
"Opium" By Luca Turin
"Opium" By Luca Turin
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston.
February 1, 2010
"Schiff bases" By Luca Turin
"Schiff bases" By Luca Turin
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.
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.
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).
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.
Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston.
January 1, 2010
"Notes from the nose -- Tiare" By Luca Turin
"Notes from the nose -- Tiare" By Luca Turin
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston.
December 1, 2009
"Cocktails" By Luca Turin
"Cocktails" By Luca Turin
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston.
November 1, 2009
"Hyperosmia" By Luca Turin
"Hyperosmia" By Luca Turin
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.
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.
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”.
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.
Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston.
October 1, 2009
"Designer Genes" By Luca Turin
"Designer Genes" By Luca Turin
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)