| |||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in The Secret of Scent for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
"'Meet Luca Turin, a renegade scientist and perfume critic with an extraordinary sense of smell.' Newsday"
Product Description
'Meet Luca Turin, a renegade scientist and perfume critic with an extraordinary sense of smell.' Newsday
Funny, irreverent and passionate, The Secret of Scent opens the lid on two worlds - the glamorous and highly lucrative realm of the perfume makers, and the equally rivalrous domain of smell science.
Smell is our forgotten sense. Long neglected by science in favour of more prestigious areas of research, it's also barely understood in general life. At the core of our sense of smell lies an enigma: why do things smell the way they do? How is smell written into the molecules? This book is the story of the quest to solve this puzzle.
Luca Turin has been described in The Economist as 'a man with a powerful nose and a bizarre obsession with perfume.' Starting with a tour of the great perfumes and their gifted makers, he shows how few people have an idea of what perfume is or how it is made, let alone how smell works and what part it plays in other pleasures like food. But not everyone has ignored this powerful sense. A small band of mavericks has been trying to crack the code of smell for 70 years. Buiding on their work, Turin thinks he has succeeded. And like all good mysteries, the solution was all the while hidden in plain sight - in this case, right under our noses.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
What a great, great book. I just finished reading it and was heading for the computer to leave some good words on Amazon to praise this masterpiece. Being a perfumer's apprentice myself, I can judge the book from own experience, working with most of the raw materials described and having had similar insights in the last few years.
Mr. Turin knows 100% what he is talking about. This is no "I copy from other books and hopefully nobody will notice" type of thing. "The secret of scent" is amazingly well written, it reads like a novell, like an adventure in science. Reading this book means great fun while teaching you the cornerstones of modern perfume design at the same time. Luca writes in a way so you can understand and not so you just know how dumb you are and how smart the author thinks he is, as many other "science books" are composed. I would recommend it to just everybody being interested in how perfumes "tick", but for perfumers it is the "#1 must read".
"The secret of scent" starts with a description of why we can't make perfumes only with natural substances alone and how it came we went deeper and deeper in understanding scents using chemistry. It then explains very detailed and in a crystal clear and logical chain HOW WE SMELL! Being a graduated physicist myself, I'm fully convinced Mr. Turin found the solution to this thousand years old mystery.
"The secret of scent" really left me breathless; a true revelation in the science of scent. IMHO, this book has a place among the "100 best popular science books ever written".
Mr. Turin knows 100% what he is talking about. This is no "I copy from other books and hopefully nobody will notice" type of thing. "The secret of scent" is amazingly well written, it reads like a novell, like an adventure in science. Reading this book means great fun while teaching you the cornerstones of modern perfume design at the same time. Luca writes in a way so you can understand and not so you just know how dumb you are and how smart the author thinks he is, as many other "science books" are composed. I would recommend it to just everybody being interested in how perfumes "tick", but for perfumers it is the "#1 must read".
"The secret of scent" starts with a description of why we can't make perfumes only with natural substances alone and how it came we went deeper and deeper in understanding scents using chemistry. It then explains very detailed and in a crystal clear and logical chain HOW WE SMELL! Being a graduated physicist myself, I'm fully convinced Mr. Turin found the solution to this thousand years old mystery.
"The secret of scent" really left me breathless; a true revelation in the science of scent. IMHO, this book has a place among the "100 best popular science books ever written".
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Well, I wish I'd had Luca Turin teaching me chemistry! Here is a scientist, who is, to use that classic word generally associated with popular TV detectives 'a maverick' . He's outside the mainstream, passionate, committed, and charismatic. And a scientist. Maverick and scientist are made for the production of conflict AND excitement.
I'd concur with the reviewer who says this is all about molecular chemistry. Yes it is. But boring? Absolutely NOT. I have some layperson's chemistry, enough to edge my way through with a lot of wet towel to the head moments - but its true to say that if you are wanting something exciting about olfaction which is more for the lay reader, there are better books, Luca Turin's own Perfumes: The A-Z Guide, a delightful, witty encyclopaedia of perfumes past and present, Chandler Burr's biography of Turin, which is more completely friendly to the physics and chemistry naif The Emperor of Scent: A Story of Perfume, Obsession and the Last Mystery of the Senses, or, if your interest is in olfaction and its evolutionary development and effects on home sapiens the engaging The Scented Ape: The Biology and Culture of Human Odour. And if you can get hold of it Lyall Watson's fabulously readable Jacobson's Organ: And the Remarkable Nature of Smell
Back to Turin, and this book. He explains clearly and engagingly 'functional groups' from an olfactory perspective, is utterly engaging about molecular chemistry, finding ways to help the almost innocent to understand how odour can be analysed, not just by complicated machines (GC/MS) but, more excitingly within the nose itself. He explains current thinking, and the battles between those who say olfaction is due to molecular shape (particle) and those who say it vibrational (wave) Shapers and Wavers! I was fascinated by the explanation of the elegance and complexity of experiments to show that the nose is a biological spectroscope.
There's no denying that this book requires hard work by the reader who doesn't have beyond A level physics and chemistry, but if you are interested in the science of smell, you will be hooked. I'd say its crucial to understand the subtitle of the book - its as much about the SCIENCE of smell as it is about adventures in perfume!
I'd concur with the reviewer who says this is all about molecular chemistry. Yes it is. But boring? Absolutely NOT. I have some layperson's chemistry, enough to edge my way through with a lot of wet towel to the head moments - but its true to say that if you are wanting something exciting about olfaction which is more for the lay reader, there are better books, Luca Turin's own Perfumes: The A-Z Guide, a delightful, witty encyclopaedia of perfumes past and present, Chandler Burr's biography of Turin, which is more completely friendly to the physics and chemistry naif The Emperor of Scent: A Story of Perfume, Obsession and the Last Mystery of the Senses, or, if your interest is in olfaction and its evolutionary development and effects on home sapiens the engaging The Scented Ape: The Biology and Culture of Human Odour. And if you can get hold of it Lyall Watson's fabulously readable Jacobson's Organ: And the Remarkable Nature of Smell
Back to Turin, and this book. He explains clearly and engagingly 'functional groups' from an olfactory perspective, is utterly engaging about molecular chemistry, finding ways to help the almost innocent to understand how odour can be analysed, not just by complicated machines (GC/MS) but, more excitingly within the nose itself. He explains current thinking, and the battles between those who say olfaction is due to molecular shape (particle) and those who say it vibrational (wave) Shapers and Wavers! I was fascinated by the explanation of the elegance and complexity of experiments to show that the nose is a biological spectroscope.
There's no denying that this book requires hard work by the reader who doesn't have beyond A level physics and chemistry, but if you are interested in the science of smell, you will be hooked. I'd say its crucial to understand the subtitle of the book - its as much about the SCIENCE of smell as it is about adventures in perfume!
35 of 41 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
At last another book written by the legendary Luca Turin. Fans of his perfume reviews have been waiting for Dr Turin's new book for months, if not years. His Perfume Guide which has been out of print for many years is almost like a bible to the many perfume lovers from around the world.
Now we have The Secret of Scent. It delivers the most amazing and interesting pieces of information for the layman and chemist/perfumer alike. His witty style keeps the prose moving and he makes the complicated parts easy to understand.
For any perfume lover, this book is a must buy!
Now we have The Secret of Scent. It delivers the most amazing and interesting pieces of information for the layman and chemist/perfumer alike. His witty style keeps the prose moving and he makes the complicated parts easy to understand.
For any perfume lover, this book is a must buy!
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Brilliantly readable science book, misleadingly marketed
Luca Turin is a witty and accessible writer who explains difficult scientific concepts with great clarity. Read more
Published 14 months ago by AnnPan
Absolutely fascinating
A real surprise, this book - I wasn't expecting popular science, but it rekindled in me a love of chemistry. Read more
Published 14 months ago by SecondCherry
Secret of Scent
Concise, beautifully written and, if you can cope with some of the more technical elements, highly informative. Achieves the right balance of entertainment and informed detail. Read more
Published on 4 Jan 2010 by N. Wykes
The Smell of Success
I bought this for a good friend who has an interest in perfumes. She took it away on a city break and spent large chunks of time reading it instead of touring Budapest. Read more
Published on 21 Jun 2009 by M. Sear
Nothing like the description !
Although this book is well written I have to say that unless you are already in or SERIOUSLY interested in the chemistry side of scent this is not a book for you ! Read more
Published on 14 Jun 2009 by Craig Purves
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
