The Emperor Of Scent: A Story of Perfume, Obsession and the Last Mystery of the Senses [Paperback]

Despite everything, despite the billions the secretive giant corporations of smell have riding on it and the powerful computers they throw at it, despite the sorcery of their legions of chemists and the years of toiling in the labs and all the famous neurowizardry aimed at mastering it, the exact way we smell things-anything, crushed raspberry and mint, the subway at West Fourteenth and Eighth, a newborn infant-remains a mystery. Luca Turin began with that mystery.

Or perhaps he began further back, with the perfumes. "The reason I got into this," Turin will say, "is that I started collecting perfume. I've loved perfume from when I was a kid in Paris and Italy."

Or maybe (he'll tell you another day, considering it from a different angle), maybe it was "because I'm French, at least by upbringing. Frenchmen will do things Anglo men won't, and France is a country of smells. There's something called pourriture noble. Noble rot. It's a fungus. It grows on grapes, draws the water out, concentrates the juice wonderfully, adds its own fungal flavor, and then you make wines like the sweet Sauternes. Paradise. From rotten grapes. The idea that things should be slightly dirty, overripe, slightly fecal is everywhere in France. They like rotten cheese and dirty sheets and unwashed women. Guy Robert is about seventy, a third-generation perfumer, lives in the south of France, used to work for International Flavors & Fragrances, created Calèche for Hermès. One day he asked me, 'Est-ce que vous avez senti some molecule or other?' And I said no, I'd never smelled it, what'd it smell like? And he considered this gravely and replied, 'Ça sent la femme qui se néglige.' " (It smells of the woman who neglects herself.)

This makes him remember something, and he leans forward enthusiastically. "One of the stories I heard when I started meeting the perfumers and was let into their tightly closed world involves Jean Carles, one of the greatest perfume makers in Paris-he used to work for Roure in Grasse, near Nice, where all perfumes used to be made. He became anosmic, lost his sense of smell, and he simply carried on from memory, creating perfumes. Like Beethoven after his deafness. Jean Carles went on to create the great Ma Griffe for Carven, a result of pure imagination in the complete absence of the relevant physical sense. Carles's condition was known only to him and his son. When a client came in, he'd go through the motions, make a big show of smelling various ingredients and, finally, the perfume he had created, which he would present with great gravity to the client, smelling it and waving its odor around the room. And he couldn't smell anything!" Turin smiles, thinking about it.

The perfume obsession led Turin to write the perfume guide, which out of the blue cracked open for him doors into the vast, secret world in which perfumes are created, and there he started noticing little things that didn't make sense. A weird warp in official reality. Plus there were the other clues, the small pockets of strangeness he bumped into in the scientific literature, carefully fitting these into the puzzle without even realizing it, without (as he'd be the first to admit) really understanding what he was doing. And somewhere along the line, between scouring the French Riviera for bottles of hidden fragrances, pursuing (in his own very particular way) the strange triplets of biology and chemistry and physics, and prowling the library's remotest stacks, randomly sliding into things he found there-something that due to his intellectual promiscuity he does a lot of-somewhere Luca Turin got the idea of cracking smell. But it started with the mystery at smell's heart, which is not only that we don't know how we do it. We actually shouldn't be able to smell at all. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.