"At the dragon zoo"
Airplanes are as large and loud as the dragons of yore. And, thanks to the imperfections of fuel distillation, they also smell highly evocative.
By Luca Turin
An airport is a zoo where fire-breathing dragons are fed and watered. When you come near, you can hear and smell the fearsome beasts long before you glimpse them, the warbling whistle of jet fans, the aromatic hot breath of jet fuel.
Piston engines burn all the fuel they’re fed and just smell of smoke. Jet engines are sloppy until warm and spit out a lot of unburned fuel at idle, hence the smell. If distillation of petroleum were perfect, kerosene would be made up only of heavy molecules, and would have almost no smell. But no one can afford perfumery-grade stills for mere fuel, so kerosene contains the petroleum equivalent of cognac, a mixture of indenes, tetralins and alkylbenzenes.
For those born just after the war, that smell recalls the epic time, roughly 1959, when dragons were finally domesticated and became beasts of burden: the effete Comet, the manly 707, the gorgeous Caravelle.
If you happen to be fond of dragon zoos, smaller is usually better: you can come closer to the animals, almost pet them through the fence. My favourite was the lovely and very decrepit museum of the Fuerza Aérea Argentina. It lived at the south end of Jorge Newbery airport in Buenos Aires, in a little triangle of land stuck between a taxiway and the main coastal road north of the city.
Big jets taxiing for take-off swept past so close you could read the markings on the tires. Old aircraft were scattered among the bushes, with the battered look of old saucepans. A small, low building housed relics of the air force. One room was full of blue-white-blue Argentinian flags, each with a sun embroidered in heavy gold thread at the centre. Each sun had a face, and each face was different, mostly melancholy, occasionally angry, as if the country itself had moods.
A second room housed aircraft engines, some cut open to reveal their shiny, now immovable innards, with the cut metal painted red like living flesh.
A third room housed the centrepiece of the museum, a glass case shaped like a coffin with bevelled crystal windows on all faces, containing a mangled mass of wooden struts, brass piping and leather straps, with the accessible parts buffed up to a high sheen. Ribbons in the national colours connected various parts of this unrecognisable object to little plaques affixed inside the crystal panes. One said "carburettor", another said "altimeter".
This turned out to be all that was left of an aircraft that had attempted to pass the Andes at their lowest point in the early 1920s and found that the lowest point was higher than it could go. The passion, the tragedy and the loneliness of early flight gripped you by the throat.
Stepping out into the sun, I was nearly blown over by the fragrant blast of a Boeing 737 turning from the taxiway to line up for take-off. I have just checked on Google Earth. The museum is gone but you can still see the shadows of the aircraft in the grass, no doubt rippling docilely when dragons growl.
Luca Turin works at the MIT; he lives in Boston.
August 1, 2009
July 1, 2009
"One-way functions" By Luca Turin
"One-way functions" By Luca Turin
I have never gone to perfume school, and it is sadly too late for me to do so, but I can imagine how the student perfumer feels when first given access to the full palette of raw materials. When I was nine years old, I used to sit at a Bechstein concert grand that belonged to family friends and, as the British say, “tickle the ivories”. Even simple chords were so beautiful, especially with the sustain pedal held down, that it was easy to understand why sung polyphony was the greatest hit for centuries. But the strange thing was how different the component notes of a chord were from the chord itself, how mysterious the added magic of playing them together. A chord never felt like the sum of its parts, some other operation seemed to be at work.
We now know that the perception of harmonies involves the comparison and matching of all the frequencies contained in each of the notes, such that the analysis our brain performs so willingly is more akin to the product of several Fourier transforms, one for each note. Such operations are not easily invertible: to dissect a complex chord into its component notes requires practice, and can be near-impossible when tricks are played with timbre: when Egberto Gismonti and Mauro Senise play a fast tune called Lôro on piano and flute in exact unison it sounds for all the world like a new instrument, a concert grand made of Baccarat crystal. Listen to 30 seconds of it on iTunes, and I am sure you’ll agree that no computer would give the correct answer.
Perfumery chords are no different: the classic bergamot-cistus-oakmoss of chypre is, once invented, as self-evident and capacious as perspective drawing. It’s as if the citrus-sweet-bitter were orthogonal axes of an invisible space, and once you had made them appear into thin air you could then put in walls and floors, hang paintings, slide sofas, move in and have a party. Even binary accords can have non-invertible magic. The vetiver-vanilla accord, once explained, falls to the floor with a loud crash and is very hard to put together.
If someone you know loves Habanita, don’t tell them how it’s done. Of course these days professionals use gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to analyze the competition and replicate it. It is easy with synthetics and harder but still doable with naturals. But how did they copy fragrances in the old days? An old perfumer told me that you could do it by identifying one raw material, smelling it pure to desensitize your nose, smelling the original mix again from which that one would now be “missing”, identifying another etc.
Such was the power of this chemical cryptography, however, that until recently, merely splitting the formula in half and never giving a single person access to all of it would guarantee its unbreakability. This is the exact equivalent of public-key cryptography: Guerlain publishes the product of two large primes, and only Jean-Paul knows both numbers. The rest of us smell a 128-digit marvel.
I have never gone to perfume school, and it is sadly too late for me to do so, but I can imagine how the student perfumer feels when first given access to the full palette of raw materials. When I was nine years old, I used to sit at a Bechstein concert grand that belonged to family friends and, as the British say, “tickle the ivories”. Even simple chords were so beautiful, especially with the sustain pedal held down, that it was easy to understand why sung polyphony was the greatest hit for centuries. But the strange thing was how different the component notes of a chord were from the chord itself, how mysterious the added magic of playing them together. A chord never felt like the sum of its parts, some other operation seemed to be at work.
We now know that the perception of harmonies involves the comparison and matching of all the frequencies contained in each of the notes, such that the analysis our brain performs so willingly is more akin to the product of several Fourier transforms, one for each note. Such operations are not easily invertible: to dissect a complex chord into its component notes requires practice, and can be near-impossible when tricks are played with timbre: when Egberto Gismonti and Mauro Senise play a fast tune called Lôro on piano and flute in exact unison it sounds for all the world like a new instrument, a concert grand made of Baccarat crystal. Listen to 30 seconds of it on iTunes, and I am sure you’ll agree that no computer would give the correct answer.
Perfumery chords are no different: the classic bergamot-cistus-oakmoss of chypre is, once invented, as self-evident and capacious as perspective drawing. It’s as if the citrus-sweet-bitter were orthogonal axes of an invisible space, and once you had made them appear into thin air you could then put in walls and floors, hang paintings, slide sofas, move in and have a party. Even binary accords can have non-invertible magic. The vetiver-vanilla accord, once explained, falls to the floor with a loud crash and is very hard to put together.
If someone you know loves Habanita, don’t tell them how it’s done. Of course these days professionals use gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to analyze the competition and replicate it. It is easy with synthetics and harder but still doable with naturals. But how did they copy fragrances in the old days? An old perfumer told me that you could do it by identifying one raw material, smelling it pure to desensitize your nose, smelling the original mix again from which that one would now be “missing”, identifying another etc.
Such was the power of this chemical cryptography, however, that until recently, merely splitting the formula in half and never giving a single person access to all of it would guarantee its unbreakability. This is the exact equivalent of public-key cryptography: Guerlain publishes the product of two large primes, and only Jean-Paul knows both numbers. The rest of us smell a 128-digit marvel.
June 1, 2009
"Magic Moments" By Luca Turin
"Magic Moments" By Luca Turin
One of the many things I love about the US is the majestic size of home appliances: to European eyes, US washing machines and driers belong to a friendly race of giants and serve as a reminder that space is always a luxury, even if you merely intend to fill it with dirty laundry. These large creatures inhabit house basements, open-plan spaces typically full of obsolete children’s toys, gardening equipment, things bought in haste and repented at leisure and, where I live at least, snow-clearing equipment ready for the next time you wake up and can no longer see your car parked in front.
As you walk past the curiously flimsy houses Americans live in, meant to last no more than one lifetime, extractor fans at street level breathe powerful blasts of laundry soap and fabric conditioner across your face. These smells suddenly make you feel you’re no longer outdoors, but in a mysterious room the size of a city. The combination of crudeness and volume tugs at your heart, like a snatch of melody played too loud by a passing car. Appliance breath has the poetic beauty of objects the wrong size, like Claes Oldenburg‘s giant telephone, three-story tall half-eaten apples and truck-sized clothespin. These fragrances are clearly not meant to be smelled at this magnification, and seem rough and hairy like newsprint seen in a microscope.
When displayed at the correct, legible size, fragrance in soap and conditioner is meant to elicit loyalty. People ultimately choose a brand because they think April Fresh or Summer Pasture smells great. It does not do so by accident. Soap manufacturers are the political parties of perfumery: a few percent change in market share is a very big win. Thousands of volunteer testers take home small test packets of proposed new fragrance compositions, and diligently fill questionnaires at critical points: after opening the washer door, while hanging the clothes to dry, and while folding them. These time points are known in the trade, without the slightest irony, as “magic moments”. Despite the very low cost of these compositions, this is where the money is made in perfumery.
A week’s worth of Tide fragrance oil is probably worth ten years of Patou’s turnover, yet every penny spent by soap makers on fragrance compositions is scrutinized as if it were a gold sovereign. Does it have to be so? Why doesn’t Guerlain make a luxury fabric softener? Probably because we wouldn’t buy it. Objects too have their castes, and we seem to like it that way: telephones must do a poor job of reproducing the human voice, burgers should be greasy, car dashboards should be plastic pretending to be leather, washing products should smell pleasant but obedient, unadorned—in one word, deferential. To borrow a Victorian phrase, they should know their place, below stairs.
One of the many things I love about the US is the majestic size of home appliances: to European eyes, US washing machines and driers belong to a friendly race of giants and serve as a reminder that space is always a luxury, even if you merely intend to fill it with dirty laundry. These large creatures inhabit house basements, open-plan spaces typically full of obsolete children’s toys, gardening equipment, things bought in haste and repented at leisure and, where I live at least, snow-clearing equipment ready for the next time you wake up and can no longer see your car parked in front.
As you walk past the curiously flimsy houses Americans live in, meant to last no more than one lifetime, extractor fans at street level breathe powerful blasts of laundry soap and fabric conditioner across your face. These smells suddenly make you feel you’re no longer outdoors, but in a mysterious room the size of a city. The combination of crudeness and volume tugs at your heart, like a snatch of melody played too loud by a passing car. Appliance breath has the poetic beauty of objects the wrong size, like Claes Oldenburg‘s giant telephone, three-story tall half-eaten apples and truck-sized clothespin. These fragrances are clearly not meant to be smelled at this magnification, and seem rough and hairy like newsprint seen in a microscope.
When displayed at the correct, legible size, fragrance in soap and conditioner is meant to elicit loyalty. People ultimately choose a brand because they think April Fresh or Summer Pasture smells great. It does not do so by accident. Soap manufacturers are the political parties of perfumery: a few percent change in market share is a very big win. Thousands of volunteer testers take home small test packets of proposed new fragrance compositions, and diligently fill questionnaires at critical points: after opening the washer door, while hanging the clothes to dry, and while folding them. These time points are known in the trade, without the slightest irony, as “magic moments”. Despite the very low cost of these compositions, this is where the money is made in perfumery.
A week’s worth of Tide fragrance oil is probably worth ten years of Patou’s turnover, yet every penny spent by soap makers on fragrance compositions is scrutinized as if it were a gold sovereign. Does it have to be so? Why doesn’t Guerlain make a luxury fabric softener? Probably because we wouldn’t buy it. Objects too have their castes, and we seem to like it that way: telephones must do a poor job of reproducing the human voice, burgers should be greasy, car dashboards should be plastic pretending to be leather, washing products should smell pleasant but obedient, unadorned—in one word, deferential. To borrow a Victorian phrase, they should know their place, below stairs.
May 1, 2009
"Millefleurs" By Luca Turin
"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
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
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.
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