"Millefleurs" By Luca Turin
A few weeks ago I was given a tour of the Henkel plant in Krefeld, a sleepy little town near Düsseldorf. Henkel is the largest German soapmaker and stands alone among its peers in having had a molecule discovery department that, in the eighties, famously stole a march on Firmenich and made Henkel’s very own Ambroxan.
The Krefeld site is a jumble of buildings, mostly lovely century-old brickwork with ample courtyards. The place is quiet, with few people visible and very little smell in the air. The plant manager showed me around, and was justifiably proud of his charge. He got a doctorate in process control and was immediately given by Henkel a chance to put company money where his mouth was, with impressive results: the place seemed to hum more smoothly than any I have seen.
We started at the beginning, where the drums of smelly stuff come in. On the principle of “trust is good, control is better” one in ten drums is sampled from the bottom (not-so clever suppliers sometimes put a layer of good stuff on top) and sent for analysis. The drums are then loaded into one of 700 vats of differing sizes from which they can be automatically dispensed under computer control to make perfumery mixes ranging from about a pint to a couple of tons.
This, among other things, means 700 stainless steel pipes running from room to room, each the size of a tennis court, while making right-angle turns right, left, up and down in formation. Thousands of valves direct the flow, and extraordinary scales weigh bathtubs full of fragrance to sub-gram precision. Everytime we moved from one building to another, giant vertical sliding doors shot up before us with a speed that made me feel important. I was taken to a room kept at the temperature of a hot day in Java, where the resinoids are kept to make sure they flow when needed. It felt like a hothouse in a zoo, as if those exotic ingredients might otherwise feel homesick.
The process is amazingly error-free and efficient: virtually the only surplus comes from the half-litre bottles of compositions that perfumers sample and then discard, because the automatic mixer cannot make a batch smaller than that. What happens to the leftovers? They get mixed into a big vat, thirty tons each year, and sold under the elegantly cynical name of Millefleurs. I asked to smell it and was offered smelling strips dipped in the last four batches, each randomly different. They smelled better than many things made on purpose.
Every company has its own Millefleurs, and each apparently has a house style. Who buys the stuff? North African soap makers, who pay € 1.50 per kg for it, i.e. at least twenty times cheaper than the cheapest proper fragrance. Henkel tried to up the price to € 1.80 recently and found no takers. It is a wonderful to think that the perfumery product most closely approaching an unrepeatable limited edition is also the cheapest.
Leserbriefe:
Zu Duftnote -- Millefleurs - NZZ-Folio Do it yourself (05/09)
Da haben sich mir doch, eigentlich zum ersten mal, seit ich das nzz folio lese, die nackenhaare gesträubt. in dem artikel steht, dass "krefeld eine verschlafenen kleinstadt nahe düsseldorf" sei! daran richtig ist nur die nähe zu düsseldorf, krefeld ist aber nicht verschlafen und auch keine kleinstadt: krefeld hat ca. 240'000 einwohner ! (und beherbergt, nebenbei bemerkt, den deutschen eishockeymeister von 2003) die henkel-seifen-fabrik liegt im uerdinger industrie-/hafengebiet, dass dort dort geschlafen wird, kann ich mir auch nicht vorstellen. wie kann luca turin nur so daneben greifen?
Reinhard Wagener, Krefeld
May 1, 2009
April 1, 2009
"No Benefits" By Luca Turin
"No Benefits" By Luca Turin
Perfumery, a hundred-year-old art, has taken a long time dying, but on January 1, 2010 it will be officially dead. On that date, amendment 43 by IFRA, the international fragrance association, will take effect, and all perfumes on the market, old, young, fine fragrance or shampoo, must follow its guidelines or be in breach of the law in the EU. Among the many disasters that will befall fine fragrance, let me pick an emblematic one: oakmoss. This material is essential to perfumery and especially to the chypre category, including Mitsouko and hundreds of others. From 2010 it will be replaced by things which do not smell like oakmoss. Why? Because it contains some things which sometimes cause rashes in some people. The death blow to oakmoss was dealt by an environmental chemist called Suresh Chandra Rastogi, working in Denmark. He and colleagues identified two molecules, atranol and chloroatranol, as particularly powerful sensitizers.
One of the subcommittees of the SCCP (Scientific Committee on Consumer Products) in the EU then looked at the evidence and decided to set very low maximum levels of these two compounds. Dr Rastogi was a member of this committee. In the civilized world this might be considered a conflict of interest, but in the nebulous world of EU policymaking it is considered due diligence. Why, you ask, does that worry me? Aren’t scientists impeccably objective? I am not disputing the veracity of Dr Rastogi’s research, though it makes mind-numbingly dull reading. But consider this: you discover some real but minor problem in a fragrance ingredient. Nice work, and you can tell your family when you get home. But if an EU committee bans the thing, that enshrines you as the Man Who Saved the World From Hideous Disfigurement by Oakmoss. In environmental science as in tabloid journalism there’s no story till the plane crashes. In another scientific paper titled “The Composition of fragrances is changing” Dr Rastogi analyses old and new perfumes and notes that his work is having an effect.
It now seems fragrance is to be composed not by perfumers, but by an EU committee of experts. What can be done to resist this? There is no point questioning the evidence for and against, or the logic of the EU decision, and here’s why: fragrance has no demonstrable benefit other than beauty. Beauty cannot be measured by environmental chemists, or, to be fair, by any other kind. In the case of medicines, you balance the positive against the negative and call the negative “side-effects”. When there is no perceived benefit, any risk is unacceptable, much as dividing anything by zero gives you infinity. By all means change the scents of skin creams and shampoos, but fine fragrance is another matter. For real perfumery I see only one, beautifully simple solution: Guerlain, who will stand to lose most from all this, must take the lead and a) bravely restore Mitsouko to its pre-reformulation glory (no point in messing around) and b) add a small label that says DO NOT SPRAY ON SKIN.
Perfumery, a hundred-year-old art, has taken a long time dying, but on January 1, 2010 it will be officially dead. On that date, amendment 43 by IFRA, the international fragrance association, will take effect, and all perfumes on the market, old, young, fine fragrance or shampoo, must follow its guidelines or be in breach of the law in the EU. Among the many disasters that will befall fine fragrance, let me pick an emblematic one: oakmoss. This material is essential to perfumery and especially to the chypre category, including Mitsouko and hundreds of others. From 2010 it will be replaced by things which do not smell like oakmoss. Why? Because it contains some things which sometimes cause rashes in some people. The death blow to oakmoss was dealt by an environmental chemist called Suresh Chandra Rastogi, working in Denmark. He and colleagues identified two molecules, atranol and chloroatranol, as particularly powerful sensitizers.
One of the subcommittees of the SCCP (Scientific Committee on Consumer Products) in the EU then looked at the evidence and decided to set very low maximum levels of these two compounds. Dr Rastogi was a member of this committee. In the civilized world this might be considered a conflict of interest, but in the nebulous world of EU policymaking it is considered due diligence. Why, you ask, does that worry me? Aren’t scientists impeccably objective? I am not disputing the veracity of Dr Rastogi’s research, though it makes mind-numbingly dull reading. But consider this: you discover some real but minor problem in a fragrance ingredient. Nice work, and you can tell your family when you get home. But if an EU committee bans the thing, that enshrines you as the Man Who Saved the World From Hideous Disfigurement by Oakmoss. In environmental science as in tabloid journalism there’s no story till the plane crashes. In another scientific paper titled “The Composition of fragrances is changing” Dr Rastogi analyses old and new perfumes and notes that his work is having an effect.
It now seems fragrance is to be composed not by perfumers, but by an EU committee of experts. What can be done to resist this? There is no point questioning the evidence for and against, or the logic of the EU decision, and here’s why: fragrance has no demonstrable benefit other than beauty. Beauty cannot be measured by environmental chemists, or, to be fair, by any other kind. In the case of medicines, you balance the positive against the negative and call the negative “side-effects”. When there is no perceived benefit, any risk is unacceptable, much as dividing anything by zero gives you infinity. By all means change the scents of skin creams and shampoos, but fine fragrance is another matter. For real perfumery I see only one, beautifully simple solution: Guerlain, who will stand to lose most from all this, must take the lead and a) bravely restore Mitsouko to its pre-reformulation glory (no point in messing around) and b) add a small label that says DO NOT SPRAY ON SKIN.
March 1, 2009
"Passionfruit" By Luca Turin
"Passionfruit" By Luca Turin
They say Passiflora is a mild hallucinogen, which may explain why the South American missionaries who “discovered” the plant saw in it a crown of thorns, five stamens representing the five wounds of Christ, five petals and five sepals the ten apostles (excluding, handily, Judas and Peter) and three stigmas for the nails on the cross. But the stoned padres ignored a far more cogent proof of the existence of god close by. I write this from Thailand, while tasting passionfruit in full glory. What passes for it in Europe is usually a mean, shrunken shell containing a spoonful of grey snot that tastes like cheap fruit cocktail. In Thailand a bag of passionfruit (1 euro) fills the room with a fragrance that all the world’s perfumers would give their last quarter-ounce of vintage Iris Gris for.
The taste is unusually true to the smell, merely stronger, parfum to the smell’s eau de toilette. In the mouth the fruit, like a perfect Sauternes, has tremendous acidity to counterbalance the lushness of the flavor. But smell a Sauternes in the glass and you’d never know it was acid: sour is a taste, not a smell. Amazingly, as if it bestowed upon us an extra sense, passionfruit manages to smell sour. Fruit have personalities: peaches are generous, apples hale, pears aristocratic, apricots gentle, mangos grand, lychees peaceable, pineapple glitzy. Passionfruit is the impossibly pretty joker in the pack, perhaps the only fruit worthy of the strange phrase tutti frutti.
I imagine flavor chemists, on the walls of their student rooms, have posters of scantily clad papayas instead of Salma Hayek and Eva Mendes. Since 1977 and the identification of a sulfur-containing molecule called Oxane, the code of passionfruit has been partially cracked. Oxane is now used and abused in all tropical fruit fragrances and flavors. It is sensationally powerful and therefore cheap: a chemist colleague once told me that 100 grams accidentally spilled in the factory drains caused the surrounding English countryside to smell of the tropics for days. But, just as tying a sarong round your waist won’t turn Basel into Bali, Oxane is only part of the answer.
A thorough analysis of the molecules emitted by passionfruit done by the great firm of Haarmann and Reimer in 1998 revealed 180 different molecules never before seen, 47 of which are sulfur compounds, with smells ranging from rotten cabbage to blocked drains. The proximity of beauty to ugliness is never clearer than in tropical fruit. Perhaps because they have to compete with powerful smells of decay for the attention of birds, tropical fruit have decided to play dirty. Adding tiny amounts of rot on an otherwise conventional fruity smell is as invigorating as finding out that a theoretical physicist colleague was once a stripper. Try this at home: buy some sulfurous kala namak salt from an Indian shop, sprinkle it on tinned fruit salad, and send me a postcard from wherever you find yourself.
They say Passiflora is a mild hallucinogen, which may explain why the South American missionaries who “discovered” the plant saw in it a crown of thorns, five stamens representing the five wounds of Christ, five petals and five sepals the ten apostles (excluding, handily, Judas and Peter) and three stigmas for the nails on the cross. But the stoned padres ignored a far more cogent proof of the existence of god close by. I write this from Thailand, while tasting passionfruit in full glory. What passes for it in Europe is usually a mean, shrunken shell containing a spoonful of grey snot that tastes like cheap fruit cocktail. In Thailand a bag of passionfruit (1 euro) fills the room with a fragrance that all the world’s perfumers would give their last quarter-ounce of vintage Iris Gris for.
The taste is unusually true to the smell, merely stronger, parfum to the smell’s eau de toilette. In the mouth the fruit, like a perfect Sauternes, has tremendous acidity to counterbalance the lushness of the flavor. But smell a Sauternes in the glass and you’d never know it was acid: sour is a taste, not a smell. Amazingly, as if it bestowed upon us an extra sense, passionfruit manages to smell sour. Fruit have personalities: peaches are generous, apples hale, pears aristocratic, apricots gentle, mangos grand, lychees peaceable, pineapple glitzy. Passionfruit is the impossibly pretty joker in the pack, perhaps the only fruit worthy of the strange phrase tutti frutti.
I imagine flavor chemists, on the walls of their student rooms, have posters of scantily clad papayas instead of Salma Hayek and Eva Mendes. Since 1977 and the identification of a sulfur-containing molecule called Oxane, the code of passionfruit has been partially cracked. Oxane is now used and abused in all tropical fruit fragrances and flavors. It is sensationally powerful and therefore cheap: a chemist colleague once told me that 100 grams accidentally spilled in the factory drains caused the surrounding English countryside to smell of the tropics for days. But, just as tying a sarong round your waist won’t turn Basel into Bali, Oxane is only part of the answer.
A thorough analysis of the molecules emitted by passionfruit done by the great firm of Haarmann and Reimer in 1998 revealed 180 different molecules never before seen, 47 of which are sulfur compounds, with smells ranging from rotten cabbage to blocked drains. The proximity of beauty to ugliness is never clearer than in tropical fruit. Perhaps because they have to compete with powerful smells of decay for the attention of birds, tropical fruit have decided to play dirty. Adding tiny amounts of rot on an otherwise conventional fruity smell is as invigorating as finding out that a theoretical physicist colleague was once a stripper. Try this at home: buy some sulfurous kala namak salt from an Indian shop, sprinkle it on tinned fruit salad, and send me a postcard from wherever you find yourself.
February 1, 2009
"Celebrity" By Luca Turin
"Celebrity" By Luca Turin
Perhaps more as a wishful thought than a sober one, I have so far taken the view that celebrity fragrances could be no worse than average, which is to say pretty bad. I was shocked to find out recently that I was wrong: a UK tabloid journalist arranged a smelling session of all the latest ones, and it was instructive to smell them one after the other. They were uniformly awful, cynically cheap compositions in ugly packaging, the saddest, cheesiest objects this side of the girl’s section in a toy store. They were also unusually bad value for money: twenty euros’ worth of celebrity fragrance gets you a fabric softener stink, while twice the money gets you the smallest-size Guerlain, a leap equivalent to going from The Eagles to Beethoven.
In the UK at least, celebrity fragrances have simply become as bad as any fragrance ever gets. But then, celebrities themselves have taken a turn for the worse. I have never understood the educated surprise at the fame of athletes, actors and explorers, since it dates back to antiquity and by now we should have gotten used to it. What is new and remarkable is that celebrity has become sexually transmissible, as if some spirochaete were responsible. We are now dealing with the wives, and in some cases the husbands of famous people: footballers have girlfriends, the girlfriends have names, the names become brands and pretty soon some thirteen-year-old girl in Sunderland steals two tenners from her mother’s purse to smell terrible.
But on reflection, that’s not new either. In some ways the famous now embody all the absurd eminence of aristocracy: complete independence from talent, transmissibility by name, elevation by marriage, ready convertibility of prestige into cash, automatic admittance to the demi-monde. They trade the elusive quality of being, as opposed to merely having. The rich want fame, and the famous want cash. It is arguably more common to be rich and obscure than poor and famous, and in any event fame can be converted into money more easily than the other way around: consider what Paris Hilton had to endure to go from stinking rich to stinking famous.
After all, if Prince Charles makes Duchy Originals biscuits, why should Wayne Rooney’s girlfriend not make a fragrance? And when you smell them all and discover that the only ones that don’t make you retch are by Jennifer Lopez and Sarah Jessica Parker, is that not a reflection of the fact that the US is charmingly middle class, with stars that can act, sing and dance, that care about their image and oversee their products?
On this side of the ocean, the celebrities do not concern themselves with such trivia: they are content to merely exist, and for little pieces of their lifestyle to be traded like fake relics of the saints. When the tabloid wrote up the piece, they came back to me to ask what I thought of No. 5. They seemed to think it was Nicole Kidman’s celebrity fragrance. Mademoiselle Chanel would be amused.
Perhaps more as a wishful thought than a sober one, I have so far taken the view that celebrity fragrances could be no worse than average, which is to say pretty bad. I was shocked to find out recently that I was wrong: a UK tabloid journalist arranged a smelling session of all the latest ones, and it was instructive to smell them one after the other. They were uniformly awful, cynically cheap compositions in ugly packaging, the saddest, cheesiest objects this side of the girl’s section in a toy store. They were also unusually bad value for money: twenty euros’ worth of celebrity fragrance gets you a fabric softener stink, while twice the money gets you the smallest-size Guerlain, a leap equivalent to going from The Eagles to Beethoven.
In the UK at least, celebrity fragrances have simply become as bad as any fragrance ever gets. But then, celebrities themselves have taken a turn for the worse. I have never understood the educated surprise at the fame of athletes, actors and explorers, since it dates back to antiquity and by now we should have gotten used to it. What is new and remarkable is that celebrity has become sexually transmissible, as if some spirochaete were responsible. We are now dealing with the wives, and in some cases the husbands of famous people: footballers have girlfriends, the girlfriends have names, the names become brands and pretty soon some thirteen-year-old girl in Sunderland steals two tenners from her mother’s purse to smell terrible.
But on reflection, that’s not new either. In some ways the famous now embody all the absurd eminence of aristocracy: complete independence from talent, transmissibility by name, elevation by marriage, ready convertibility of prestige into cash, automatic admittance to the demi-monde. They trade the elusive quality of being, as opposed to merely having. The rich want fame, and the famous want cash. It is arguably more common to be rich and obscure than poor and famous, and in any event fame can be converted into money more easily than the other way around: consider what Paris Hilton had to endure to go from stinking rich to stinking famous.
After all, if Prince Charles makes Duchy Originals biscuits, why should Wayne Rooney’s girlfriend not make a fragrance? And when you smell them all and discover that the only ones that don’t make you retch are by Jennifer Lopez and Sarah Jessica Parker, is that not a reflection of the fact that the US is charmingly middle class, with stars that can act, sing and dance, that care about their image and oversee their products?
On this side of the ocean, the celebrities do not concern themselves with such trivia: they are content to merely exist, and for little pieces of their lifestyle to be traded like fake relics of the saints. When the tabloid wrote up the piece, they came back to me to ask what I thought of No. 5. They seemed to think it was Nicole Kidman’s celebrity fragrance. Mademoiselle Chanel would be amused.
January 1, 2009
"Purification" By Luca Turin
"Purification" By Luca Turin
The idea that adding something can take something away is magic. Air fresheners rely on this, for example in toilets where bad smells in a small space will be somehow subtracted by good smells coming from a spray can with a picture of the Alps on it. It works with spirits, i.e. metaphysical farts, as well. My mother lived in a haunted flat for a while, where strange noises, sensations and moved objects made her life miserable until she used a Lampe Berger, that wonderful flameless burner invented a century ago, and filled it with a Patricia de Nicolai scent. Things calmed down instantly.
This is the rationale behind Papier d’Arménie, blotting paper steeped in benzoin resin you find in the form of green and yellow booklets in French Tabacs. The booklet says “burn it in hotel rooms where unclean individuals have sojourned before you”, a clearly magical instruction. But to paraphrase Arthur C Clarke, any magic will sooner or later will become indistinguishable from technology.
An improvement on Papier d’Arménie, closer to real effectiveness, is Ozium, a mysterious fluid in a striped spray can of pure ‘fifties design, three shades of light blue, with the cursive inscription “Glycolized”. According to Ozium’s makers “Each use will release a pleasant fragrance that kills odor-causing bacteria and converts smoke particles into clean, fresh air”. We are still close to magic, but in my experience Ozium works rather well.
Then, without much fuss, after centuries of rituals there came technology. Procter and Gamble’s Febreze contains cyclodextrins, cup-shaped molecules that actually attach to odors. Oddly, as a sort of homage to past magic, P&G still puts fragrance in it, which must complicate things. The stuff works so well guys in the US spray their clothes with it instead of washing them, a fine example of unintended consequences of both magic and technology.
The idea that adding something can take something away is magic. Air fresheners rely on this, for example in toilets where bad smells in a small space will be somehow subtracted by good smells coming from a spray can with a picture of the Alps on it. It works with spirits, i.e. metaphysical farts, as well. My mother lived in a haunted flat for a while, where strange noises, sensations and moved objects made her life miserable until she used a Lampe Berger, that wonderful flameless burner invented a century ago, and filled it with a Patricia de Nicolai scent. Things calmed down instantly.
This is the rationale behind Papier d’Arménie, blotting paper steeped in benzoin resin you find in the form of green and yellow booklets in French Tabacs. The booklet says “burn it in hotel rooms where unclean individuals have sojourned before you”, a clearly magical instruction. But to paraphrase Arthur C Clarke, any magic will sooner or later will become indistinguishable from technology.
An improvement on Papier d’Arménie, closer to real effectiveness, is Ozium, a mysterious fluid in a striped spray can of pure ‘fifties design, three shades of light blue, with the cursive inscription “Glycolized”. According to Ozium’s makers “Each use will release a pleasant fragrance that kills odor-causing bacteria and converts smoke particles into clean, fresh air”. We are still close to magic, but in my experience Ozium works rather well.
Then, without much fuss, after centuries of rituals there came technology. Procter and Gamble’s Febreze contains cyclodextrins, cup-shaped molecules that actually attach to odors. Oddly, as a sort of homage to past magic, P&G still puts fragrance in it, which must complicate things. The stuff works so well guys in the US spray their clothes with it instead of washing them, a fine example of unintended consequences of both magic and technology.
December 1, 2008
"Moving parts" By Luca Turin
"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.
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.
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.
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