"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.
April 1, 2008
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.
December 1, 2007
"Amouage" By Luca Turin
"Amouage" By Luca Turin
In fifteen years of fragrance reviewing, I have only accepted one invitation to a proper perfume launch somewhere exotic, and that was for Amouage’s 25th anniversary, about which more below. I should add that I only received one other invitation during that period. It involved spending two days in Portofino covered in cucumber slices, and on day 3 giving a lecture on cucumbers.
The story of Amouage is remarkable. Twenty five years ago an Omani prince decided that his country, renowned since Egyptian times for the quality of its frankincense, home to the unique Green Mountain rose and on whose beaches half the world’s ambergris lands at random, needed a perfume firm that would take on the world’s greatest.
He commissioned the great perfumer Guy Robert and gave him that rarest of all fragrance briefs: an unlimited budget. The result was Gold, a magnificent fragrance based on Oman’s three great raw materials. For a time Amouage Gold was the most expensive fragrance on earth, but in recent years it has become possible to spend a great deal more and get a whole lot less. Later Amouage fragrances were less good, (though Dia for men is a paragon of dry darkness), and the recent Reflections were simply awful. A new art director has taken charge and wants to put Amouage back on track. I had rehearsed a speech exhorting him to hire the orientalist perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour for his next fragrance.
Clearly, Arabs invented luxury: every palace dreams of being the Alhambra, every bedroom a sheikh’s tent and all jewelry aspires to being sold by weight and poured into cupped hands. All else is merely luxury goods, not the real thing. LVMH executives should visit an Omani perfume store. The lead crystal bottles sitting on blue silk in wooden caskets look like presents from a future without moving parts. Half a dozen grades of the amazing rotten oud wood are available for burning. A large bottle on the shelf says "ambergris". Full of the cynical skepticism that comes from spending more than a week in the fragrance industry, I ask to smell it. It is top-class ambergris, and I treat myself to an ounce of raunchy oil.
Later, at a reception under the moon and fireworks, in a crowd peppered with bodyguards bearing silver daggers, we watched Guy Robert showered with applause. Then, like kids leaving a birthday party, we collected a bag with the two new fragrances and could smell them at last. To my relief both were very good. The feminine is a Diorella with tuberose. The masculine is a lovely incense composition, by Bertrand Duchaufour.
In fifteen years of fragrance reviewing, I have only accepted one invitation to a proper perfume launch somewhere exotic, and that was for Amouage’s 25th anniversary, about which more below. I should add that I only received one other invitation during that period. It involved spending two days in Portofino covered in cucumber slices, and on day 3 giving a lecture on cucumbers.
The story of Amouage is remarkable. Twenty five years ago an Omani prince decided that his country, renowned since Egyptian times for the quality of its frankincense, home to the unique Green Mountain rose and on whose beaches half the world’s ambergris lands at random, needed a perfume firm that would take on the world’s greatest.
He commissioned the great perfumer Guy Robert and gave him that rarest of all fragrance briefs: an unlimited budget. The result was Gold, a magnificent fragrance based on Oman’s three great raw materials. For a time Amouage Gold was the most expensive fragrance on earth, but in recent years it has become possible to spend a great deal more and get a whole lot less. Later Amouage fragrances were less good, (though Dia for men is a paragon of dry darkness), and the recent Reflections were simply awful. A new art director has taken charge and wants to put Amouage back on track. I had rehearsed a speech exhorting him to hire the orientalist perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour for his next fragrance.
Clearly, Arabs invented luxury: every palace dreams of being the Alhambra, every bedroom a sheikh’s tent and all jewelry aspires to being sold by weight and poured into cupped hands. All else is merely luxury goods, not the real thing. LVMH executives should visit an Omani perfume store. The lead crystal bottles sitting on blue silk in wooden caskets look like presents from a future without moving parts. Half a dozen grades of the amazing rotten oud wood are available for burning. A large bottle on the shelf says "ambergris". Full of the cynical skepticism that comes from spending more than a week in the fragrance industry, I ask to smell it. It is top-class ambergris, and I treat myself to an ounce of raunchy oil.
Later, at a reception under the moon and fireworks, in a crowd peppered with bodyguards bearing silver daggers, we watched Guy Robert showered with applause. Then, like kids leaving a birthday party, we collected a bag with the two new fragrances and could smell them at last. To my relief both were very good. The feminine is a Diorella with tuberose. The masculine is a lovely incense composition, by Bertrand Duchaufour.
November 1, 2007
"Dreamjob" By Luca Turin
"Dreamjob" By Luca Turin
Last week I visited two US universities, MIT and Georgetown, to give talks and meet graduate students on their way to molecular biology and chemistry PhDs. On both occasions, I was approached by students (one from Lausanne, one from Beirut) who, very shyly and tentatively, explained to me that their dream was to become perfumers. I was surprised that people who had worked so hard to belong to a scientific elite should actually wish to do something completely different. Nevertheless, they wanted advice, and I gave them some: I tried to talk them out of it. In my opinion, they would be wasted on Britney Spears Incurious Red.
Scientists are not always the most cheerful of people, but as a group I find them less cynical than perfumers, which suggests that they are getting more fun from their profession. Also, I don’t think perfumery is a level playing field, and what the students said confirmed this. They wrote left and right and got no answers. They had both eventually figured out that there is only one proper, open perfumery school on earth, the Isipca in Versailles, but that most of the teaching there is done in French. Other than that, the big five firms have internal schools, but none of their websites has a link that says, “Want to become a perfumer?” Those who train in the internal schools seem to do so in addition to whatever their normal job is, marketing, evaluation, compounding, and learn it as a craft rather than an art or a science.
Imagine if physics were only taught at General Electric, and only after hours. Imagine learning cuisine if there were only five good restaurants on earth. Small wonder so many of the young perfumers are sons and daughters of people in the same profession. That is the surest sign that some talent is being wasted. I asked the great perfumer Françoise Caron once how she had got into it. She explained to me that when she grew up in Grasse, the choice for an adolescent was either to steal motorcycles or to go into perfumery, and she didn’t like bikes. What the world needs is an international school of perfumery where the whole complicated shebang, from art history to chemistry via composition, is taught in English to those who can pay the fees or are sent there on scholarships from perfumery firms. All I ask is to be a member of the jury that awards the prize for Best First Fragrance.
Last week I visited two US universities, MIT and Georgetown, to give talks and meet graduate students on their way to molecular biology and chemistry PhDs. On both occasions, I was approached by students (one from Lausanne, one from Beirut) who, very shyly and tentatively, explained to me that their dream was to become perfumers. I was surprised that people who had worked so hard to belong to a scientific elite should actually wish to do something completely different. Nevertheless, they wanted advice, and I gave them some: I tried to talk them out of it. In my opinion, they would be wasted on Britney Spears Incurious Red.
Scientists are not always the most cheerful of people, but as a group I find them less cynical than perfumers, which suggests that they are getting more fun from their profession. Also, I don’t think perfumery is a level playing field, and what the students said confirmed this. They wrote left and right and got no answers. They had both eventually figured out that there is only one proper, open perfumery school on earth, the Isipca in Versailles, but that most of the teaching there is done in French. Other than that, the big five firms have internal schools, but none of their websites has a link that says, “Want to become a perfumer?” Those who train in the internal schools seem to do so in addition to whatever their normal job is, marketing, evaluation, compounding, and learn it as a craft rather than an art or a science.
Imagine if physics were only taught at General Electric, and only after hours. Imagine learning cuisine if there were only five good restaurants on earth. Small wonder so many of the young perfumers are sons and daughters of people in the same profession. That is the surest sign that some talent is being wasted. I asked the great perfumer Françoise Caron once how she had got into it. She explained to me that when she grew up in Grasse, the choice for an adolescent was either to steal motorcycles or to go into perfumery, and she didn’t like bikes. What the world needs is an international school of perfumery where the whole complicated shebang, from art history to chemistry via composition, is taught in English to those who can pay the fees or are sent there on scholarships from perfumery firms. All I ask is to be a member of the jury that awards the prize for Best First Fragrance.
October 1, 2007
"Eminenences Grises" By Luca Turin
"Eminenences Grises" By Luca Turin
Graham Greene once complained that, having struck it rich with his early novels, he moved to Cap Ferrat only to discover he was the poorest man on the peninsula. Science often works like that: you think you’ve cracked a problem and feel ready to turn on cruise control to coast for a while, when a strange fact comes up, sits at the back of the lecture hall and asks a question that reveals the depth of your ignorance. My day job is to design molecules for fragrances and flavors. I naively thought that if I could come up with something that smells good, is powerful, non-toxic and cheap to make, I would pretty much earn my keep. I was wrong. Time and again, the most experienced perfumers at fragrance firms ask for something completely different and far more mysterious. They want an “effect” material, not a smell.
Effect materials are as old as perfumery itself, and the first such were natural musks. By itself, natural musk has a strange, not particularly strong, not especially pleasant smell of unwashed underwear. But spray it on one wrist and overlay it with a well-known fragrance, and spray the fragrance alone on the other wrist for comparison. The absence of musks is akin to shutting one eye when looking into a 3-D viewer. The scene is the same, but the depth is gone. Other, equally legendary molecules have different effects. Salicylates turn the most banal floral composition into a real perfume, with majestic weight and sweep. Hedione has a magical ability to make things glisten, to fill the spaces between perfume components with a fresh, liquid air. Iso-E Super, long before Julian Schnabel got the idea on canvas, allowed perfumers to paint on black velvet.
But here’s where it gets strange. As it happens, some of these molecules are odorless to some people, including of course perfumers. This is particularly common with salicylates and musks. The perfumer Guy Robert once explained to me that he could not smell benzyl salicylate at all, but could instantly recognize its presence in a perfumery composition. He used a wonderful image: “I recognize it as if it were a friend seen from behind in a crowd, by the cut of his shoulders”. What is going on? Some blind people know that a light is there, even though they can’t see it. Do we have detectors other than those of smell to tell us a chemical is in the air ? What do these molecules have in common? This Rosetta Stone awaits a Champollion, who is probably in year 1 at ETH as I write.
Graham Greene once complained that, having struck it rich with his early novels, he moved to Cap Ferrat only to discover he was the poorest man on the peninsula. Science often works like that: you think you’ve cracked a problem and feel ready to turn on cruise control to coast for a while, when a strange fact comes up, sits at the back of the lecture hall and asks a question that reveals the depth of your ignorance. My day job is to design molecules for fragrances and flavors. I naively thought that if I could come up with something that smells good, is powerful, non-toxic and cheap to make, I would pretty much earn my keep. I was wrong. Time and again, the most experienced perfumers at fragrance firms ask for something completely different and far more mysterious. They want an “effect” material, not a smell.
Effect materials are as old as perfumery itself, and the first such were natural musks. By itself, natural musk has a strange, not particularly strong, not especially pleasant smell of unwashed underwear. But spray it on one wrist and overlay it with a well-known fragrance, and spray the fragrance alone on the other wrist for comparison. The absence of musks is akin to shutting one eye when looking into a 3-D viewer. The scene is the same, but the depth is gone. Other, equally legendary molecules have different effects. Salicylates turn the most banal floral composition into a real perfume, with majestic weight and sweep. Hedione has a magical ability to make things glisten, to fill the spaces between perfume components with a fresh, liquid air. Iso-E Super, long before Julian Schnabel got the idea on canvas, allowed perfumers to paint on black velvet.
But here’s where it gets strange. As it happens, some of these molecules are odorless to some people, including of course perfumers. This is particularly common with salicylates and musks. The perfumer Guy Robert once explained to me that he could not smell benzyl salicylate at all, but could instantly recognize its presence in a perfumery composition. He used a wonderful image: “I recognize it as if it were a friend seen from behind in a crowd, by the cut of his shoulders”. What is going on? Some blind people know that a light is there, even though they can’t see it. Do we have detectors other than those of smell to tell us a chemical is in the air ? What do these molecules have in common? This Rosetta Stone awaits a Champollion, who is probably in year 1 at ETH as I write.
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