"Moving parts" By Luca Turin
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.
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.
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.
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.
December 1, 2008
November 1, 2008
"Anthropine" By Luca Turin
"Anthropine" By Luca Turin
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
October 1, 2008
"Real Gardenia" By Luca Turin
"Real Gardenia" By Luca Turin
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.
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.
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.
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?”.
Leserbriefe:
Zu Duftnote -- Real Gardenia - NZZ-Folio Gratis (10/08)
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.
M. Reber, per E-Mail
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.
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.
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.
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?”.
Leserbriefe:
Zu Duftnote -- Real Gardenia - NZZ-Folio Gratis (10/08)
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.
M. Reber, per E-Mail
September 1, 2008
"Duftnote -- Two stinks" By Luca Turin
"Duftnote -- Two stinks" By Luca Turin
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.
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.
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.
Luca Turin ist Forschungsleiter bei Flexitral Inc.; er lebt in London.
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.
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.
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.
Luca Turin ist Forschungsleiter bei Flexitral Inc.; er lebt in London.
August 1, 2008
"Jasmin et Cigarette" By Luca Turin
"Jasmin et Cigarette" By Luca Turin
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
July 1, 2008
"Caravelle" By Luca Turin
"Caravelle" By Luca Turin
Recently, while perusing an oddly melancholy book titled "Classic Early Airliners 1958-1979," full of slightly faded, bluish photographs of long-scrapped aircraft parked in front of long-demolished airport terminals, my eye fell on one particular Air France Caravelle, F-BHRV. It was named "Provence," first flew in 1960 and was melted down in 1980. I distinctly remember taking that very aircraft several times, climbing up the forward air-stair, reading the name in a blood-red, clumsily streamlined engineer’s typeface, hearing the stewardess saying, "Bonjour Madame, Bonjour Monsieur," in that uniquely French timbre that has the festive, slightly indecent euphoria of wine gurgling out of a bottle. And I remember the smell of Air France airliners, a simple cologne, but dignified, perhaps with a touch of lavender or chypre in the background.
What the voice and the cologne told you, as you passed the threshold of the small forward door, was that although the ground you had just left might be a distant land, you were now in France, as if the aircraft were an inviolate embassy carrying French air wherever it went. I imagine one could still locate in retirement, phone, and cause to be called in from the garden those who can answer questions about the odd triangular shape of the Caravelle’s windows. I’m pretty sure a Balmain archivist could locate the drawings of the powder-blue uniforms. And of course the fill-your-glass voice still exists, though the French have since added a voiced "e" at the end of bonjour. But I doubt very much anyone at Air France could help you find out what that cologne was. Thus go smells, transiently trapped air, forever essential, forever unnoticed.
My mother told me that one night fifty years ago in Egypt, by the kindness of an archaeologist friend, she witnessed the removal of stone slabs covering an area of pristine sand in which the footsteps of a priest had been imprinted three thousand years earlier. The team frantically took photographs under the floodlights until the gentle night breeze erased the dance. Some people have tried to retrieve from ancient pots the sounds and voices that were around when they were turned, recorded by air pressure on the potter’s hands as on a wax cylinder. When I see a diver’s watch on someone’s wrist, I wonder about the trapped Swiss or Japanese air it imprisons, and what it would smell of if we were small enough to find out.
Recently, while perusing an oddly melancholy book titled "Classic Early Airliners 1958-1979," full of slightly faded, bluish photographs of long-scrapped aircraft parked in front of long-demolished airport terminals, my eye fell on one particular Air France Caravelle, F-BHRV. It was named "Provence," first flew in 1960 and was melted down in 1980. I distinctly remember taking that very aircraft several times, climbing up the forward air-stair, reading the name in a blood-red, clumsily streamlined engineer’s typeface, hearing the stewardess saying, "Bonjour Madame, Bonjour Monsieur," in that uniquely French timbre that has the festive, slightly indecent euphoria of wine gurgling out of a bottle. And I remember the smell of Air France airliners, a simple cologne, but dignified, perhaps with a touch of lavender or chypre in the background.
What the voice and the cologne told you, as you passed the threshold of the small forward door, was that although the ground you had just left might be a distant land, you were now in France, as if the aircraft were an inviolate embassy carrying French air wherever it went. I imagine one could still locate in retirement, phone, and cause to be called in from the garden those who can answer questions about the odd triangular shape of the Caravelle’s windows. I’m pretty sure a Balmain archivist could locate the drawings of the powder-blue uniforms. And of course the fill-your-glass voice still exists, though the French have since added a voiced "e" at the end of bonjour. But I doubt very much anyone at Air France could help you find out what that cologne was. Thus go smells, transiently trapped air, forever essential, forever unnoticed.
My mother told me that one night fifty years ago in Egypt, by the kindness of an archaeologist friend, she witnessed the removal of stone slabs covering an area of pristine sand in which the footsteps of a priest had been imprinted three thousand years earlier. The team frantically took photographs under the floodlights until the gentle night breeze erased the dance. Some people have tried to retrieve from ancient pots the sounds and voices that were around when they were turned, recorded by air pressure on the potter’s hands as on a wax cylinder. When I see a diver’s watch on someone’s wrist, I wonder about the trapped Swiss or Japanese air it imprisons, and what it would smell of if we were small enough to find out.
June 1, 2008
"Skin Physics" By Luca Turin
"Skin Physics" By Luca Turin
I was in New York City with my coauthor Tania Sanchez for the launch of the new perfume guide, and the publisher had scheduled a medieval ordeal for us: 30 or so interviews of 5-9 minutes each in quick succession for a total of four hours. The way this is done now is from your hotel room by digital link with a switchboard that hands you over to one station after another, like air traffic control during a transcontinental flight. This being the morning, the hosts that came on air were invariably chirpy to the point of discomfort. But the hard part was that they all asked the same two questions: Are celebrity fragrances uniformly bad ? Do fragrances smell different on different people ? The answer to the first is that celebrities have little control over the fragrance that bears their name, so the stuff cannot be worse than average, i.e. awful. The second question is trickier. I have long assumed that everything fragrance marketing says must be exactly wrong. It turns out to be more like a mythomanic friend of mine who would tell outrageous stories about herself to the point where at long last you ceased to believe her, precisely when the most outrageous of her tales (e.g. dancing on the tables at the Café Royal) turned out to be confirmed by several eyewitnesses. There must be some truth to the skin chemistry thing: in the final stages of fragrance composition perfumers always rope in their colleagues to bare their arms for spraying to see the range of effects obtained. They would not do it if there was no variation. So what exactly happens ? I object to the term chemistry, since no two-electrons bonds are made or broken, but I’m happy with the idea of skin physics. Your skin is made up of proteins and fats. Like silk knickers (silk is, after all, caterpilar protein) or butter, it will therefore absorb odors. The extent to which it does so will depend on complex factors such as how hard you rubbed the skin, and how much fat you’ve added (lotion) or taken off (soap). This will unquestionably affect the most volatile parts of the fragrance, i.e. the first ten minutes. Whether it messes with the rest needs to be tested by proper experiment and for all I know is already the subject of a 200-page internal report at Givaudan. But try to explain this to people stuck in morning traffic.
I was in New York City with my coauthor Tania Sanchez for the launch of the new perfume guide, and the publisher had scheduled a medieval ordeal for us: 30 or so interviews of 5-9 minutes each in quick succession for a total of four hours. The way this is done now is from your hotel room by digital link with a switchboard that hands you over to one station after another, like air traffic control during a transcontinental flight. This being the morning, the hosts that came on air were invariably chirpy to the point of discomfort. But the hard part was that they all asked the same two questions: Are celebrity fragrances uniformly bad ? Do fragrances smell different on different people ? The answer to the first is that celebrities have little control over the fragrance that bears their name, so the stuff cannot be worse than average, i.e. awful. The second question is trickier. I have long assumed that everything fragrance marketing says must be exactly wrong. It turns out to be more like a mythomanic friend of mine who would tell outrageous stories about herself to the point where at long last you ceased to believe her, precisely when the most outrageous of her tales (e.g. dancing on the tables at the Café Royal) turned out to be confirmed by several eyewitnesses. There must be some truth to the skin chemistry thing: in the final stages of fragrance composition perfumers always rope in their colleagues to bare their arms for spraying to see the range of effects obtained. They would not do it if there was no variation. So what exactly happens ? I object to the term chemistry, since no two-electrons bonds are made or broken, but I’m happy with the idea of skin physics. Your skin is made up of proteins and fats. Like silk knickers (silk is, after all, caterpilar protein) or butter, it will therefore absorb odors. The extent to which it does so will depend on complex factors such as how hard you rubbed the skin, and how much fat you’ve added (lotion) or taken off (soap). This will unquestionably affect the most volatile parts of the fragrance, i.e. the first ten minutes. Whether it messes with the rest needs to be tested by proper experiment and for all I know is already the subject of a 200-page internal report at Givaudan. But try to explain this to people stuck in morning traffic.
May 1, 2008
"Cut and Paste" By Luca Turin
"Cut and Paste" By Luca Turin
Some years ago, when internet translation tools first appeared, I used to play a little game by taking a piece of text and having Babelfish translate it back and forth from, say, French to English twenty or thirty times. I was interested to see whether it would converge to a stable text, slowly drift like chinese whispers or explode into experimental literature. It mostly converged, usually to a text that had the slight, giddy slack in the steering that you encounter in user manuals for Lithuanian lasers and Chinese aircraft: factually accurate, even pedantic, but still undefinably odd. A similar thing seems to be happening in fragrance. When they arrive at work and put their coat on the stand, perfumers these days find a stack of gas chromatography printouts on their desk, typically molecule-by molecule analyses of successful fragrances annotated by people whose job it is to figure which exact mixture of synthetics and naturals went into the original thing. It is then a fairly simple matter for the perfumer to cut and paste any accord into a new composition, and to create a new hybrid, not from first principles but from ready-made building blocks: the head of Jennifer Lopez, the shoulders of Sarah Jessica Parker and the tennis legs of Britney Spears. These permutations become perfumes that are themselves analyzed, cut and pasted, released and so iterated ad infinitum.
Is the process converging ? I believe so: synthetic fragrances are getting more complex because everybody benefits from the tricks invented by everybody else. The botanical vocabulary of, say, white florals is now converging towards a truly abstract bouquet made entirely from non-existent flower species. The transvestite descendants of Angel, which initially smelled like a guy morphing into a woman now smell like a crowd out on the town. Masculines are converging towards a photofit of the ideal culprit, the sort of guy his own mother wouldn’t recognize in a lineup. What force keeps perfumes from becoming completely identical within a genre ? My perfumer friend Calice Becker explained to me recently that within each of the five large firms that dominate the industry, perfumers have no access to their colleagues’ compositions, much less of course to GC traces. The bigger the firm, the bigger its perfumers’ blind spot and the more creative they have to be. This suggests that the cure for the lack of originality in this business would be the consolidation of the Big Five into one or two huge firms employing thousands of perfumers all kept ignorant of each other. Mergers and Acquisitions will save perfumery.
Some years ago, when internet translation tools first appeared, I used to play a little game by taking a piece of text and having Babelfish translate it back and forth from, say, French to English twenty or thirty times. I was interested to see whether it would converge to a stable text, slowly drift like chinese whispers or explode into experimental literature. It mostly converged, usually to a text that had the slight, giddy slack in the steering that you encounter in user manuals for Lithuanian lasers and Chinese aircraft: factually accurate, even pedantic, but still undefinably odd. A similar thing seems to be happening in fragrance. When they arrive at work and put their coat on the stand, perfumers these days find a stack of gas chromatography printouts on their desk, typically molecule-by molecule analyses of successful fragrances annotated by people whose job it is to figure which exact mixture of synthetics and naturals went into the original thing. It is then a fairly simple matter for the perfumer to cut and paste any accord into a new composition, and to create a new hybrid, not from first principles but from ready-made building blocks: the head of Jennifer Lopez, the shoulders of Sarah Jessica Parker and the tennis legs of Britney Spears. These permutations become perfumes that are themselves analyzed, cut and pasted, released and so iterated ad infinitum.
Is the process converging ? I believe so: synthetic fragrances are getting more complex because everybody benefits from the tricks invented by everybody else. The botanical vocabulary of, say, white florals is now converging towards a truly abstract bouquet made entirely from non-existent flower species. The transvestite descendants of Angel, which initially smelled like a guy morphing into a woman now smell like a crowd out on the town. Masculines are converging towards a photofit of the ideal culprit, the sort of guy his own mother wouldn’t recognize in a lineup. What force keeps perfumes from becoming completely identical within a genre ? My perfumer friend Calice Becker explained to me recently that within each of the five large firms that dominate the industry, perfumers have no access to their colleagues’ compositions, much less of course to GC traces. The bigger the firm, the bigger its perfumers’ blind spot and the more creative they have to be. This suggests that the cure for the lack of originality in this business would be the consolidation of the Big Five into one or two huge firms employing thousands of perfumers all kept ignorant of each other. Mergers and Acquisitions will save perfumery.
April 1, 2008
"Bath Salts" By Luca Turin
"Bath Salts" By Luca Turin
I hold the view that souls are slightly soluble in water, and that one has to be careful taking long hot baths for fear of emerging diminished in wit and energy, and the difficulty of growing back a decent-size aura in time for supper. This point of view seems similar to one held by the British, whose pharmacies sell a vast array of bath salts. These have, according the the writing on the packaging, the ability to soak away aches and pains, though strangely they make no mention of spiritual side-effects.
I had been using my kids’ strawberry-scented shampoo for months as a luxurious foam bath when I came upon a new and improved bath salt by the venerable firm of Radox. Bath salts are a peculiar thing: they dissolve in a cloud of tiny bubbles, make the bath water cloudy, colored and fragrant, and produce no foam. They also tend to leave a bit of grit at the bottom of the tub as a reminder that there is no such thing as a perfectly comfortable moment, barring the use of certain opiates. This one contains thyme, is colored an intense sky blue, has a little transparent window on the front of the box to prove it, and is called Muscle Soak, which, in combination with the picture of herbs on the box, was a little too reminiscent of a marinade to be entirely reassuring. Nevertheless I poured a generous dose into the bath, whereupon I was overcome by a full-size Proustian Moment and cried aloud, "Stergene!"
Aeons ago, when I first got to University, I moved into a bare, modern little room in a dormitory. It had a bed, a sink and a desk. I loved having my entire life within arm’s reach. There, because I had been indoctrinated by my mother in not subjecting wool sweaters to a machine wash, which would reliably turn them into oven mitts, I used to (rarely but carefully) wash my sweaters in the sink in cold water, using a dark blue liquid detergent called Stergene. The salubrious, clean smell of it was for me what incense is for devout Orthodox Christians: a soul-cleansing ritual. That blue Stergene was discontinued thirty years ago, and I had given up on ever encountering its smell again, since for some reason perfume nuts do not sell vintage detergents on ebay. But lo! The exact smell of Stergene has reincarnated, come back to me like an avatar, only in this life I’m the sweater.
I hold the view that souls are slightly soluble in water, and that one has to be careful taking long hot baths for fear of emerging diminished in wit and energy, and the difficulty of growing back a decent-size aura in time for supper. This point of view seems similar to one held by the British, whose pharmacies sell a vast array of bath salts. These have, according the the writing on the packaging, the ability to soak away aches and pains, though strangely they make no mention of spiritual side-effects.
I had been using my kids’ strawberry-scented shampoo for months as a luxurious foam bath when I came upon a new and improved bath salt by the venerable firm of Radox. Bath salts are a peculiar thing: they dissolve in a cloud of tiny bubbles, make the bath water cloudy, colored and fragrant, and produce no foam. They also tend to leave a bit of grit at the bottom of the tub as a reminder that there is no such thing as a perfectly comfortable moment, barring the use of certain opiates. This one contains thyme, is colored an intense sky blue, has a little transparent window on the front of the box to prove it, and is called Muscle Soak, which, in combination with the picture of herbs on the box, was a little too reminiscent of a marinade to be entirely reassuring. Nevertheless I poured a generous dose into the bath, whereupon I was overcome by a full-size Proustian Moment and cried aloud, "Stergene!"
Aeons ago, when I first got to University, I moved into a bare, modern little room in a dormitory. It had a bed, a sink and a desk. I loved having my entire life within arm’s reach. There, because I had been indoctrinated by my mother in not subjecting wool sweaters to a machine wash, which would reliably turn them into oven mitts, I used to (rarely but carefully) wash my sweaters in the sink in cold water, using a dark blue liquid detergent called Stergene. The salubrious, clean smell of it was for me what incense is for devout Orthodox Christians: a soul-cleansing ritual. That blue Stergene was discontinued thirty years ago, and I had given up on ever encountering its smell again, since for some reason perfume nuts do not sell vintage detergents on ebay. But lo! The exact smell of Stergene has reincarnated, come back to me like an avatar, only in this life I’m the sweater.
March 1, 2008
"Do-it-yourself-Parfum" By Luca Turin
"Do-it-yourself-Parfum" By Luca Turin
I consider made-to-measure perfumes as silly as having a novel written specially for you, and find most all-natural perfumes invertebrate. The combination, a bespoke natural perfume, was therefore as irresistible to me as a roadside sign in Bourgogne saying “pick your own escargots”. However, the perfume guide I’ve just finished co-writing does include one brand of natural fragrances, those from profumo.it. The guy who makes them, Dominique Dubrana, is a French-born self-taught perfumer (www.profumo.it). His compositions just happen to be really good. He called me up recently and suggested I look at a new feature on his website. On it you can now compose your own fragrance by ticking boxes of raw materials in seven different categories: flowers, spices, trees, fruity, special, resins and pheromones. Each category contains from 6 to 13 possibilities. Picking just one in each would afford you just under six million choices. Knowing my skepticism, he offered me a free try (the finished product, no matter what’s in it, retails for 165 €).
I picked rose, chamomile, carrot seed, sandalwood, tonka, benzoin and castoreum. This was a little disingenuous on my part, because I had once seen all these in Jean Carles’ recipe for Lucien Lelong’s magnificent Elle,Elle and wanted to see whether Dubrana’s creation would spontaneously gravitate towards that paragon of sentimental perfection. What money buys you on the profumo website is Dubrana’s time and skill as well as the raw materials. What I like about this is the absence of any irrelevant claptrap: childhood memories, astrological signs, personality types, palmistry, etc. But it does require a little knowledge of what the materials smell like. The aromatherapy rack at your local hippie store will help with most of them, and you can read about the rest on wikipedia. I assume Dubrana picked the menu carefully, and would probably tell you if your chosen combination was guaranteed to smell awful.
Today the perfume came in the post. Dubrana had warned me that, to his surprise, it smelled of violets. The combination of boozy rose, rooty carrot seed and the blowsy warmth of chamomile smelled iris-like to me. It was oddly satisfying to spray from a bottle labeled Luca (by rights they should all be called Dominique, but who’s going to argue?). Much more important, it was a kissing cousin of Elle, Elle and exactly, uncannily my kind of perfume: transparent, melancholy and on the edge between woods and flowers. Not for the first time, I have to eat my words.
I consider made-to-measure perfumes as silly as having a novel written specially for you, and find most all-natural perfumes invertebrate. The combination, a bespoke natural perfume, was therefore as irresistible to me as a roadside sign in Bourgogne saying “pick your own escargots”. However, the perfume guide I’ve just finished co-writing does include one brand of natural fragrances, those from profumo.it. The guy who makes them, Dominique Dubrana, is a French-born self-taught perfumer (www.profumo.it). His compositions just happen to be really good. He called me up recently and suggested I look at a new feature on his website. On it you can now compose your own fragrance by ticking boxes of raw materials in seven different categories: flowers, spices, trees, fruity, special, resins and pheromones. Each category contains from 6 to 13 possibilities. Picking just one in each would afford you just under six million choices. Knowing my skepticism, he offered me a free try (the finished product, no matter what’s in it, retails for 165 €).
I picked rose, chamomile, carrot seed, sandalwood, tonka, benzoin and castoreum. This was a little disingenuous on my part, because I had once seen all these in Jean Carles’ recipe for Lucien Lelong’s magnificent Elle,Elle and wanted to see whether Dubrana’s creation would spontaneously gravitate towards that paragon of sentimental perfection. What money buys you on the profumo website is Dubrana’s time and skill as well as the raw materials. What I like about this is the absence of any irrelevant claptrap: childhood memories, astrological signs, personality types, palmistry, etc. But it does require a little knowledge of what the materials smell like. The aromatherapy rack at your local hippie store will help with most of them, and you can read about the rest on wikipedia. I assume Dubrana picked the menu carefully, and would probably tell you if your chosen combination was guaranteed to smell awful.
Today the perfume came in the post. Dubrana had warned me that, to his surprise, it smelled of violets. The combination of boozy rose, rooty carrot seed and the blowsy warmth of chamomile smelled iris-like to me. It was oddly satisfying to spray from a bottle labeled Luca (by rights they should all be called Dominique, but who’s going to argue?). Much more important, it was a kissing cousin of Elle, Elle and exactly, uncannily my kind of perfume: transparent, melancholy and on the edge between woods and flowers. Not for the first time, I have to eat my words.
February 1, 2008
"Cinq Bis" By Luca Turin
"Cinq Bis" By Luca Turin
There is a fellow in Mexico who inherited a perfume store from his grandparents and has been selling the contents piecemeal for several years. He initially had no idea about fragrance, and tentatively put some pre-WWI Parfums de Rosine unopened bottles up for sale on ebay with a starting bid of 99 cents. They went for about a thousand each, at which point he wised up and understood he was a millionaire. He later left ebay and now has his own website (eurofinegifts.com). Last week my coauthor Tania Sanchez was looking at the stock. She bought, among other things, a small bottle of Molyneux’s Numéro Cinq, a perfume I’d always heard about but never smelled.
There are two mutually exclusive stories about Numéro Cinq, and I do not know which is true. The first is that Captain Edward Molyneux, after losing an eye and gaining a Military Cross in the Great War, opened a fashion boutique in Paris in 1919. He befriended Chanel who had just done the same, and together they hatched the idea of each bringing out a perfume called No 5 the same day in 1921, to see who would win. The outcome of that contest is no longer in doubt, but this version of the story says that Molyneux’ Cinq was far ahead of Chanel’s for several years. The other (recorded in Nigel Groom’s excellent Perfume Handbook) is that Molyneux brought out several perfumes at once in 1925 named after different addresses of the firm: 3, 14 and Numéro Cinq, referred to as “Le Parfum Connu” to avoid troubles with Chanel. Either way, fashion designers clearly had more of a sense of humor then than now.
There is no question that Chanel had a better eye: the Molyneux looks drab. But the fragrance! I expected something dated and derivative, and was taken by surprise: Numéro Cinq is surpassingly beautiful and strange, the only example I know of an iris oriental. Assuming the fragrance wasn’t changed, the uncertainty about its age then becomes as exciting as the discovery of an Egyptian mummy clutching an iPod. 1921 is when the first oriental, Coty’s Emeraude, came out. 1925 is the birth date of its famous successor Shalimar. If Molyneux’ 5 dates from 1921, perfume history needs to be rewritten. If it dates from 1925, then both it and Shalimar were copying Emeraude, and the question is: why did Molyneux’ line die out ? Maybe the joke backfired, and everything would have been different if Captain Molyneux had said “Numéro Six”.
There is a fellow in Mexico who inherited a perfume store from his grandparents and has been selling the contents piecemeal for several years. He initially had no idea about fragrance, and tentatively put some pre-WWI Parfums de Rosine unopened bottles up for sale on ebay with a starting bid of 99 cents. They went for about a thousand each, at which point he wised up and understood he was a millionaire. He later left ebay and now has his own website (eurofinegifts.com). Last week my coauthor Tania Sanchez was looking at the stock. She bought, among other things, a small bottle of Molyneux’s Numéro Cinq, a perfume I’d always heard about but never smelled.
There are two mutually exclusive stories about Numéro Cinq, and I do not know which is true. The first is that Captain Edward Molyneux, after losing an eye and gaining a Military Cross in the Great War, opened a fashion boutique in Paris in 1919. He befriended Chanel who had just done the same, and together they hatched the idea of each bringing out a perfume called No 5 the same day in 1921, to see who would win. The outcome of that contest is no longer in doubt, but this version of the story says that Molyneux’ Cinq was far ahead of Chanel’s for several years. The other (recorded in Nigel Groom’s excellent Perfume Handbook) is that Molyneux brought out several perfumes at once in 1925 named after different addresses of the firm: 3, 14 and Numéro Cinq, referred to as “Le Parfum Connu” to avoid troubles with Chanel. Either way, fashion designers clearly had more of a sense of humor then than now.
There is no question that Chanel had a better eye: the Molyneux looks drab. But the fragrance! I expected something dated and derivative, and was taken by surprise: Numéro Cinq is surpassingly beautiful and strange, the only example I know of an iris oriental. Assuming the fragrance wasn’t changed, the uncertainty about its age then becomes as exciting as the discovery of an Egyptian mummy clutching an iPod. 1921 is when the first oriental, Coty’s Emeraude, came out. 1925 is the birth date of its famous successor Shalimar. If Molyneux’ 5 dates from 1921, perfume history needs to be rewritten. If it dates from 1925, then both it and Shalimar were copying Emeraude, and the question is: why did Molyneux’ line die out ? Maybe the joke backfired, and everything would have been different if Captain Molyneux had said “Numéro Six”.
January 1, 2008
"Nombre Noir" By Luca Turin
"Nombre Noir" By Luca Turin
Disregarding market laws, in 1994 I wrote that Shiseido’s Nombre Noir was the best fragrance ever. At about the time a friend walked off with my bottle, Shiseido took it off the market and all known stock was destroyed. Perfume collectors took notice; soon I could not afford it even at eBay auctions and lost one for $800, an insane sum, to a Swiss buyer. My entire stock consisted of the dregs of an eau de toilette bottle that had been badly stored. I had lately given up and tried not to think about it.
Last week, after a twelve-year drought, on successive days two friends showered me with enough Nombre Noir to last several lifetimes. The first gave me in a plain atomizer a generous decant from her personal stock. The second was Evan Izer. He lives in Brooklyn, in a spotless loft filled with objects he has amassed over the years, mostly ‘fifties, none showy, all solid, every one embodying the optimistic nobility of great design. He collects vintage perfumes on eBay-not with the sporadic excitement of the beginner or the jaded lust of the rich expert, not because they are rare, not because of the bottles, but because the genie they imprison has the power to make the air he breathes more beautiful.
He never spends large sums on them, and in fact almost every one of his finds is ludicrously cheap. Like a seasoned hunter, he tricks his quarry, typing in search words with mistakes like Gueblain (a misreading), Hicky (a mistyping), indicators of the careless, inexpert seller. He asked me over for tea, which he served in a beautiful black Wedgwood service that took him a decade to put together, and talked about his finds as if they had mysteriously appeared by his bed while he slept.
He first produced a huge four-ounce crystal bottle of perfect Emeraude from the ‘fifties, bought for $60. After a long pause, he averred that he seemed to find himself in possession of four unopened half-ounces of Nombre Noir parfum. He said “four” in the tone of a person who keeps hamsters and is concerned at the rate at which they breed. These came from a basement in the United Arab Emirates, which must have been air-conditioned, because they were perfect. Graciously pretending not to know what it meant to me, he gave me one: the Sainte Chapelle stained glass in liquid form.
Disregarding market laws, in 1994 I wrote that Shiseido’s Nombre Noir was the best fragrance ever. At about the time a friend walked off with my bottle, Shiseido took it off the market and all known stock was destroyed. Perfume collectors took notice; soon I could not afford it even at eBay auctions and lost one for $800, an insane sum, to a Swiss buyer. My entire stock consisted of the dregs of an eau de toilette bottle that had been badly stored. I had lately given up and tried not to think about it.
Last week, after a twelve-year drought, on successive days two friends showered me with enough Nombre Noir to last several lifetimes. The first gave me in a plain atomizer a generous decant from her personal stock. The second was Evan Izer. He lives in Brooklyn, in a spotless loft filled with objects he has amassed over the years, mostly ‘fifties, none showy, all solid, every one embodying the optimistic nobility of great design. He collects vintage perfumes on eBay-not with the sporadic excitement of the beginner or the jaded lust of the rich expert, not because they are rare, not because of the bottles, but because the genie they imprison has the power to make the air he breathes more beautiful.
He never spends large sums on them, and in fact almost every one of his finds is ludicrously cheap. Like a seasoned hunter, he tricks his quarry, typing in search words with mistakes like Gueblain (a misreading), Hicky (a mistyping), indicators of the careless, inexpert seller. He asked me over for tea, which he served in a beautiful black Wedgwood service that took him a decade to put together, and talked about his finds as if they had mysteriously appeared by his bed while he slept.
He first produced a huge four-ounce crystal bottle of perfect Emeraude from the ‘fifties, bought for $60. After a long pause, he averred that he seemed to find himself in possession of four unopened half-ounces of Nombre Noir parfum. He said “four” in the tone of a person who keeps hamsters and is concerned at the rate at which they breed. These came from a basement in the United Arab Emirates, which must have been air-conditioned, because they were perfect. Graciously pretending not to know what it meant to me, he gave me one: the Sainte Chapelle stained glass in liquid form.
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