A friend told me about this last week and now I find it in the paper
Luca Turin is a fragrange guru and revolutionary, I gather.
Both books look like interesting reads.
Quote:
In his book The Secret of Scent, biophysicist Luca Turin says smell is mysterious, not because we believe it to be unreliable, but because we don't understand how it works.
He explains that each scent is based on a molecule, and that each molecule smells different. The problem, he says, is that "we don't know how our nose reads them. Hundreds of times each week chemists somewhere on earth make a new molecule.
Every time it is an absolute mystery what each molecule is going to smell like. It is as if each new molecule were an inscribed clay tablet with a word written in an unknown script and a smell to go with it, like banana or rose or musk.
The pile of tablets is now enormous, so big in fact that no one can have smelled more than a fraction of the total, and we still don't understand how the things are written.
The smell is encoded in the molecule using a cipher. Like all good mysteries, it is hidden in plain sight. It has, if anything, deepened as our knowledge of smell has increased.
Like most enticing enigmas it is simply stated: what is this chemical alphabet that our noses read so effortlessly from birth?"
Turin has proposed a controversial theory of smell, which he explains in his book. Turin's journey is also described by journalist Chandler Burr in his book, The Emperor of Scent.
Both books evoke, in their own way, the sensory world of smell, its paradoxes and mysteries.
And both are concerned with the practical difficulties experienced by fragrance designers - commercial artists - working in a world that has come to be dominated by a science that remains imprecise.
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http://www.theage.com.au/news/beauty...476103819.html
