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The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell
“A rich sensory trip . . . this indispensable guide to all things smelly is as good as it gets.”—Sunday Telegraph One man's passion for perfume leads him to explore one of the most intriguing scientific What makes one molecule smell of garlic while another smells of rose? In this witty, engrossing, and wildly original volume, author Luca Turin explores the two competing theories of smell. Is scent determined by molecular shape or molecular vibrations? Turin describes in fascinating detail the science, the evidence, and the often contentious debate—from the beginnings of organic chemistry to the present day—and pays homage to the scientists who went before. With its uniquely accessible and captivating approach to science via art, The Secret of Scent will appeal to anyone who has ever wondered about the most mysterious of the five senses.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published May 18, 2006
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2075 people want to read
About the author
Luca Turin
15 books60 followersLuca Turin is a biophysicist with a long-standing interest in the sense of smell, the art of perfume, and the fragrance industry.
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December 9, 2014
I was really interested in this book because I consider myself a supersmeller and love to read about the science behind things. But I started reading and quickly became disappointed with it. It's not a good book, it's not well written, and only maybe 5% of it is interesting at all.
As someone who has a science job and reads and writes about science all the time, let me explain why:
1) What an arrogant ass. Talking so much about how a book was written about him, the endless figures in the book that have no reference to the text or explanation (I guess he's too good for that), how great he is for making an acid-resistant citrus scent, and talking about scents as metaphors that make no sense, like "so and so smells like the essence of brown," or "if you add this to that the smell goes from grey to pink." What does that even mean? I'll tell you. It means nothing at all. It means he's an ass. Oh and he "defies" anyone who's not an expert in the field to name any ingredient in Coke. O YA? I Knew 3 right away by scent alone and can make a mean cocktail that VERY much resembles coke just by using stuff in my cupboard. So challenge accepted, ass.
2) The science is not well explained. He says he hopes non-scientists will read his book, and he starts off at a level so basic in the beginning that I skipped over it, but then starts explaining things really, really terribly. One example is when he starts talking about the polarograph. After he talks about himself a bunch, and how important the polarograph is, he starts explaining how easy it is to make one, before explaining what the hell a polarograph even is. Seriously, what is it? Is the explanation in here where he's explaining how to make one? I really don't know.
3) The explanations are not well written. One marker of a good science writer is that when you start explaining a difficult topic, you have to constantly remind readers WHY you are explaining that, and how is that relevant to what you're ultimately trying to say. I know enough chemistry to understand what he was saying and it was very clear to me that he most certainly does not do that, and uses terminology that only an expert would understand. Except of course when he tries to use similes and metaphors with everyday things. Which leads me to:
4) All those garbage similes and metaphors. Terrible, awful, nonsense things. Like some molecule or another doing something is "like asking Tommy Lee Jones to play a nun." WHAT? What are you talking about? Really? And "calling yourself a theoretitian in biology is considered a perversion, like preferring erotic literature to real sex." Really? Okay. Many, many comparisons in there that are non-sequitur and make zero sense. Maximum cringeworthiness all the way.
5) Seriously though, what an ass. Let's talk about the structure of the book. Most of the book consists of long boring explanations of how this or that old theory of smell is wrong. So-and-so is wrong because of this-and-that, blah blah, until at the very end we get to the author's theory. This comes across as extremely self-serving and indulgent. Just get to the effing point already.
Which leads us to the 5% of the book that was interesting. Spoiler alert: scent is detected not by the shape of the molecule but by the vibrations it emits. There you go, the whole book in one sentence. Now you don't have to read it. You're welcome.
As someone who has a science job and reads and writes about science all the time, let me explain why:
1) What an arrogant ass. Talking so much about how a book was written about him, the endless figures in the book that have no reference to the text or explanation (I guess he's too good for that), how great he is for making an acid-resistant citrus scent, and talking about scents as metaphors that make no sense, like "so and so smells like the essence of brown," or "if you add this to that the smell goes from grey to pink." What does that even mean? I'll tell you. It means nothing at all. It means he's an ass. Oh and he "defies" anyone who's not an expert in the field to name any ingredient in Coke. O YA? I Knew 3 right away by scent alone and can make a mean cocktail that VERY much resembles coke just by using stuff in my cupboard. So challenge accepted, ass.
2) The science is not well explained. He says he hopes non-scientists will read his book, and he starts off at a level so basic in the beginning that I skipped over it, but then starts explaining things really, really terribly. One example is when he starts talking about the polarograph. After he talks about himself a bunch, and how important the polarograph is, he starts explaining how easy it is to make one, before explaining what the hell a polarograph even is. Seriously, what is it? Is the explanation in here where he's explaining how to make one? I really don't know.
3) The explanations are not well written. One marker of a good science writer is that when you start explaining a difficult topic, you have to constantly remind readers WHY you are explaining that, and how is that relevant to what you're ultimately trying to say. I know enough chemistry to understand what he was saying and it was very clear to me that he most certainly does not do that, and uses terminology that only an expert would understand. Except of course when he tries to use similes and metaphors with everyday things. Which leads me to:
4) All those garbage similes and metaphors. Terrible, awful, nonsense things. Like some molecule or another doing something is "like asking Tommy Lee Jones to play a nun." WHAT? What are you talking about? Really? And "calling yourself a theoretitian in biology is considered a perversion, like preferring erotic literature to real sex." Really? Okay. Many, many comparisons in there that are non-sequitur and make zero sense. Maximum cringeworthiness all the way.
5) Seriously though, what an ass. Let's talk about the structure of the book. Most of the book consists of long boring explanations of how this or that old theory of smell is wrong. So-and-so is wrong because of this-and-that, blah blah, until at the very end we get to the author's theory. This comes across as extremely self-serving and indulgent. Just get to the effing point already.
Which leads us to the 5% of the book that was interesting. Spoiler alert: scent is detected not by the shape of the molecule but by the vibrations it emits. There you go, the whole book in one sentence. Now you don't have to read it. You're welcome.
Read
April 29, 2014Fascinating. I barely understood a word.
December 20, 2007
Turin is something of an olfactory mutant, possessing a preternaturally fine-tuned sense of smell and an almost freakish ability to translate scents into verbal terms.
Consider his Proustian description of a peach base composed by Pierre Nuyens: "It is a peach played slowly, an arpeggiato chord that lets you enjoy in slow motion the entire sweep of that astonishing Persian plum from mouthwatering fruity acid, via biscuit-like softness to powdery, almost soapy bottom." Or his damning assessment of 57 for Her in his perfume guide as "a sad little thing, an incongruous dried-prunes note with a metallic edge that manages the rare feat of being at once cloying and harsh."
A fragrance, he believes, like the timbre of a voice, can say something entirely removed from the words actually spoken. The voice of a Japanese perfume called Nombre Noir, for instance, is likened to "that of a child older than its years, at once fresh, husky, modulated and faintly capricious."
The danger with this kind of dexterous wordplay is that it's often difficult to distinguish the literal from the metaphoric. By "soapy" does Turin mean that the scent actually smells like soap, or that it merely shares some abstract quality one associates with soap, like freshness, purity, or springiness?
Nonetheless, Turin's endless insights are dazzling to behold. The Secret of Smell provides not only an exhaustive tour through the mechanics of olfactory perception and the multi-million dollar business of fragrance production, but of Turin's eccentric mind—a spectacle well worth the price of the ticket.
It may be said, however, that the same eccentricity that distinguishes him—his loquacity, his zeal—also makes him a lousy storyteller. He wants to tell us everything, he wants us to smell things as he smells them, to grasp the behavior of molecules as easily as he does. And he wants to do it all at once. The result is a jagged patchwork of anecdotes, compact explanations, illuminating concepts and scientific microhistories held together by little other than Turin's irreverent personality.
And such irreverence! He trumpets and extols, he snorts and scoffs, he huffs, grumbles, guffaws—all with an exalted gunslinging rhetoric that can veer dangerously close to glib overstatement.
With this in mind, it's of little surprise that Turin has had such trouble getting his theories taken seriously in the scientific community, despite the copious evidence he's amassed. No one doubts that the phenomenon of scent results from the inhalation of molecules. The controversy lies in how those molecules interact with receptors in the nose. Turin argues that our receptors respond to a molecule's frequency of vibration, rather than its shape, as most believe.
The case is made more effectively in Chandler Burr's remarkable 1994 biography of Turin, The Emperor of Scent. Here we see the tempestuous biophysicist in all his virtuosity and exuberance, only mitigated through Burr's discerning and steady-nerved portraiture. The narrative distance lends a certain levity to Turin's otherwise distracting idiosyncrasies. As a protagonist he is a colorful renegade rather than a truculent iconoclast.
Consider his Proustian description of a peach base composed by Pierre Nuyens: "It is a peach played slowly, an arpeggiato chord that lets you enjoy in slow motion the entire sweep of that astonishing Persian plum from mouthwatering fruity acid, via biscuit-like softness to powdery, almost soapy bottom." Or his damning assessment of 57 for Her in his perfume guide as "a sad little thing, an incongruous dried-prunes note with a metallic edge that manages the rare feat of being at once cloying and harsh."
A fragrance, he believes, like the timbre of a voice, can say something entirely removed from the words actually spoken. The voice of a Japanese perfume called Nombre Noir, for instance, is likened to "that of a child older than its years, at once fresh, husky, modulated and faintly capricious."
The danger with this kind of dexterous wordplay is that it's often difficult to distinguish the literal from the metaphoric. By "soapy" does Turin mean that the scent actually smells like soap, or that it merely shares some abstract quality one associates with soap, like freshness, purity, or springiness?
Nonetheless, Turin's endless insights are dazzling to behold. The Secret of Smell provides not only an exhaustive tour through the mechanics of olfactory perception and the multi-million dollar business of fragrance production, but of Turin's eccentric mind—a spectacle well worth the price of the ticket.
It may be said, however, that the same eccentricity that distinguishes him—his loquacity, his zeal—also makes him a lousy storyteller. He wants to tell us everything, he wants us to smell things as he smells them, to grasp the behavior of molecules as easily as he does. And he wants to do it all at once. The result is a jagged patchwork of anecdotes, compact explanations, illuminating concepts and scientific microhistories held together by little other than Turin's irreverent personality.
And such irreverence! He trumpets and extols, he snorts and scoffs, he huffs, grumbles, guffaws—all with an exalted gunslinging rhetoric that can veer dangerously close to glib overstatement.
With this in mind, it's of little surprise that Turin has had such trouble getting his theories taken seriously in the scientific community, despite the copious evidence he's amassed. No one doubts that the phenomenon of scent results from the inhalation of molecules. The controversy lies in how those molecules interact with receptors in the nose. Turin argues that our receptors respond to a molecule's frequency of vibration, rather than its shape, as most believe.
The case is made more effectively in Chandler Burr's remarkable 1994 biography of Turin, The Emperor of Scent. Here we see the tempestuous biophysicist in all his virtuosity and exuberance, only mitigated through Burr's discerning and steady-nerved portraiture. The narrative distance lends a certain levity to Turin's otherwise distracting idiosyncrasies. As a protagonist he is a colorful renegade rather than a truculent iconoclast.
January 24, 2008
Turin writes that he has a "Paragraph rule" which states that "In almost every science textbook, there is one point, usually of paragraph length, where the style of the author matches exactly one's style of understanding, and which we then grasp properly and permanently." I don't think I grasped the secret of scent from this book but found it enjoyable. I did also like Turin's description of the periodic table "I see it as a sort of class photograph.Fat guys at the bottom, thin ones on top, arranged from left to right by temperament, with the placid types (eight electrons)at the far right, seated just next to the seven electron psychopaths. The recklessly generous one electron types are safely at the far left, and the well rounded individuals, those who should(and did) go far in life, somewhere near the middle."
September 12, 2007
I read a book about Turin (The Emperor of Scent) that I really enjoyed, so I was excited to find this on my library shelf. Turin puts me in mind of Feynman in both erudition and wry hilarity. This scientist can write circles around most writers. The topic, the biological mechanisms by which we perceive scent, is fascinating. The writing, may I say again, is scintillating. The physics slowed me down some, but Turin made it more accessible to me than anyone since Feynman. I learned and laughed in equal measure. I find Turin's theory of the human spectroscope compelling, but like him, am content to wait for proof. Highly recommended.
February 19, 2008
This book is about smell. Which i LOVE. Yet the most generous i can be with it is that it was bizarre. The first half was a real struggle to get through b/c the author is kind of an ass and says some appallingly non-scientific (and actually false) things, especially considering he's a scientist. The second half was better, but still not super well written. splat.
Read
August 9, 2011If you're a science numbskull (like, um, me), the last half of the book will be difficult to follow. Also, I would have liked to have known how Turin became interested in perfume in the first place--don't know why he couldn't have devoted a few pages to that. Finally, there were lots of diagrams of smell molecules. IMAGINE IF THEY HAD BEEN LABELED! That would have helped. I mean, really.
August 23, 2017
Pompous with irrelevant comparisons and descriptions. The endless stream of unnecessary anecdotes and references makes this book a bore, half the time I was unsure how the paragraphs had anything to do with each other, and completely goes by the point of explaining to the reader how odours and smell work. Interesting concept, badly executed.
July 1, 2009
Meh...poorly organized, kinda scattered for most of the book. not a particularly compelling description of research or science, and some glaring errors in chemistry and evolutionary theory. I liked the last 20 pages, though, when all the rambling was brought together.
May 29, 2023
Mildly interested. Like I got thrust back into Organic Chemistry (and it’s been a decade +). So ngl I glazed over A LOT throughout this book. Heavy on scientific structures and chemical bonds. I’m still interested in the science of olfaction though. I just wanted more theories, dawg. He gave them but, you know, eh.
April 15, 2019
The science writing started to get a bit over my head, but Luca Turin does such an incredible job with beautifully-written and sometimes a bit ridiculous analogies that my brain was able to grasp most of it. He's the best sassy biophysicist perfumery nerd grandpa.
January 13, 2021
3,5*
Per daug arogancijos, per mažai mokslo ir konstruktyvių argumentų.
Nors dievinu Turiną ir jo YT kanalą, kuriame yra kur kas daugiau vertingos informacijos tragedijos (kvepalų simfonijos) gimime.
Per daug arogancijos, per mažai mokslo ir konstruktyvių argumentų.
Nors dievinu Turiną ir jo YT kanalą, kuriame yra kur kas daugiau vertingos informacijos tragedijos (kvepalų simfonijos) gimime.
May 30, 2007
Perhaps it's not a good book combination, perfume and the science of smell. Obviously, they fit together quite neatly, but how many people are at least mildly interested in hearing about the beauty of perfume and the detailed science of smell. Well, I heard about it on NPR and it worked for me.
The Author is a biophysicist who has an immense obsession with perfume and believes he has figured out how we smell the molecules we do (apparently that is still very much not understood). Unfortunately other scientists don't believe him so now he has a smell producing company that acurrately makes molecules that smell a certain way 1 in 10 times instead of the industry's 1 in 1000.
The book is divided into these sections- why perfume is so cool, what we know about how the science of smell works (and what is up for debate), various scientists who have worked on the problem in the past and why they screwed up even if they were on the right track and then his own personal experiences.
I guess it's a manifesto about why he is right for the general public and I bought it. The science part is quite detailed for laypeople like me, but I got through and enjoyed it, plus I feel smarter for it.
The Author is a biophysicist who has an immense obsession with perfume and believes he has figured out how we smell the molecules we do (apparently that is still very much not understood). Unfortunately other scientists don't believe him so now he has a smell producing company that acurrately makes molecules that smell a certain way 1 in 10 times instead of the industry's 1 in 1000.
The book is divided into these sections- why perfume is so cool, what we know about how the science of smell works (and what is up for debate), various scientists who have worked on the problem in the past and why they screwed up even if they were on the right track and then his own personal experiences.
I guess it's a manifesto about why he is right for the general public and I bought it. The science part is quite detailed for laypeople like me, but I got through and enjoyed it, plus I feel smarter for it.
January 6, 2009
Luca Turin is an amazing writer as well as a gifted scientist and perfume expert. This book managed to convey some incredibly complicated organic chemistry in an accessible and understandable way to the extent that I was actually able to understand the science behind Turin's hypothesis of the nose as a mass spectrometer.
My only criticism is that part of the story of the development of the theory was missing from the book because it has already been written up by Chandler Burr in "The Emperor of Scent", a book about Turin's battles with the scientific establishment.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who has ever wondered how their noses work, and why things smell like they do. Absolutely excellent!
My only criticism is that part of the story of the development of the theory was missing from the book because it has already been written up by Chandler Burr in "The Emperor of Scent", a book about Turin's battles with the scientific establishment.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who has ever wondered how their noses work, and why things smell like they do. Absolutely excellent!
August 27, 2010
Wow. Je m'étais toujours demandé comment fonctionnait notre nez et notre reconnaissance des odeurs! Voilà que ce petit livre explique tout, d'une plume vive et bien aiguisée. Bien que l'auteur prenne parfois des détours un peu encombrants afin de raconter comment la science a fini par comprendre l'odorat, la lecture n'est jamais ennuyante. Il faut être patient toutefois, car la réponse à notre question ne se trouve qu'à la toute fin du livre. Comme quoi la physique ça ne sert pas qu'à essayer d'attraper d'hypothétiques particules.
January 1, 2011
I wish that schools tought children the way Turin explains chemistry. This book offers a little bit of Poetry of Scent (i wish there was more of that) and some chemistry to make his Vibration theory more convincing.
From this book i learned much about his fascinating theory of oilfactory processing in animal brain. More importantly for me, he reminded me of interesting art which modern global trends have gradually converted into just another somber industry.
From this book i learned much about his fascinating theory of oilfactory processing in animal brain. More importantly for me, he reminded me of interesting art which modern global trends have gradually converted into just another somber industry.
August 6, 2021
This is the best Chemistry text I’ve ever read. The man can turn a phrase and articulate with panache. And relevant entertaining conjecture backed up by his famous nose, deep research and dogged determinism. I couldn’t ask for a more positive experience whilst having my mind blown.
September 23, 2022
I don't give up on books, even when they're terrible I persevere and finish.
I abandoned this book on page 80. I hated it so much I was avoiding reading.
If you love chemistry and obscure history this book is for you.
I abandoned this book on page 80. I hated it so much I was avoiding reading.
If you love chemistry and obscure history this book is for you.
February 6, 2016
Most of my life, I didn't pay so much attention to my senses, to the point that in high school food didn't have taste, then at the end of high school my senses started to "awaken". I started to love food and tasting it and guessing the ingredients, started to love listening to music and learning the genres and reading about Music Theory and so on. Then my smelling, my mom always claimed that I have good tasting and smelling (I liked to guess by smell what ingredients she's cooking downstairs) senses, but it was mostly smelling food. When I graduated from college and got a job, I started to use perfumes and dress nice (at least the first few months), I suddenly realized that there are perfumes in the world, as if I had eyes since I was born but only later I noticed vivid colors!
I would just sniff around and discuss with people how sweet or how sharp or how fruity or how stingy their perfumes were. I needed to know the science behind it. Reading this book if you love perfumes is like learning music scales if you like music! I adore how poetic this scientific book is, Luca Turin is an artist (who happens to have a PhD in Biophysics).
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Some history about perfumery
"It was Nombre Noir that got me started on a long journey towards the secret of smell, a journey that would take fifteen years. The secret is this: though we now know almost everything there is to know about molecules, we don't know how our noses read them... Every time it is an absolute mystery what each molecule is going to smell like... What is this chemical alphabet that our noses read so effortlessly from birth? Part of the reason for the lack of interest in the subject must be that smell science products little that is useful to the sober pursuits of medicine and technology. There are few diseases of smell, and those that exist are usually incurable and get little sympathy. And though it is big business, fragrance is a low-tech frivolous and fickle world. The relative neglect of smell compared to other senses may also have to do with the fact that it cannot be easily transmitted like images and sound. As a colleague of mine put it, 'You still can't fax a perfume'", but that applies to taste (flavor) too, "possibly also, it is wrongly held to be less reliable as a sensation than vision or sound. Finally, there is a definite 'real men don't do this' side to smell and fragrance... Whatever the reasons, the cipher remains unbroken. This does not mean that people do not care. Everyone has wondered about the nature of odors from antiquity onwards. Smell was (rightly) taken as evidence for existence of atoms and (wrongly) for their having different shapes, some smooth (roses), some sharp-edged (mustard). Modern theories are only slightly different... Here I tell the story of how I think I finally cracked the code. Actually, as often happens, it had been cracked twice before by brilliant minds, but nobody took them seriously. All I did was extend their work, and this book is my tribute to their insights... There is a lot of money to be made by efficiently designing new fragrances and flavors", so yes fragrance and flavor have similar aspects.
Shockingly, "only 3% or so of the price in the shop is the smell. The rest is packaging, advertising and margins". And yet this 3% keeps shrinking and fragrance ingredients get cheaper and cheaper, to squeeze more profit pennies, damn you Capitalism!
Captives are one-in-a-millionth chemical compounds (yet they make half the smell, our noses are really sensitive) that make all the difference in very successful unmimkable (captives are very hard to scan chemically and usually patented) fragrances.
"There are no exact equivalents in smell... That's why the event is rare, and that's why we notice it... The uniqueness goes right down to the molecular level. As I've said, there are no synonyms: no two different compounds out of the hundreds of thousands made so far have identical smells", and that what makes fragrances so unique and rare and memorable.
Synthesized smells aren't bad, "natural" doesn't always mean good (they too complex to give room for creativity) and "chemical" does not always mean bad (they are simple thus boring, but they can be improved on into very unique and new things). Nature is good, but not perfect as most people assume. There isn't a cancer cure out there in Nature that waits to be discovered. Nature has poisonous beautiful (deception) flowers, and deadly bears (as Stephen Colbert says lol).
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General observations about smelling
"Our noses like short words... Roughly speaking, anything more than sixteen carbons stand a good chance of being odorless... Musk is exactly 16 Cs"
"The shorter the word, the shorter the smell. Short words are 'top/high notes', spray CSC on your skin and you will smell of truffles for thirty seconds. Every letter adds roughly a factor of two to the time. You will smell of cheap musk (16 Cs) for thirty hours or more, this would be a 'bottom' or 'drydown' note"
"Smelly molecules are made from only five types of atom: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and sulphur, these are also the five elements that make up all life"
"The molecules must be able to fly in order to reach our noses, so they should carry no charges that make them stick to each other"
"They should be as unreactive as possible"
"Most importantly: no two words smell the same. Smell of musk (16 Cs) when one C shorter will smell of cedar wood. There are plenty of siblings, but not exact twins in smell"
Smell becomes perfume, chemical poems. Many hundreds of such words make a perfume. Short words are the first to smell (and first to disappear) because they are light and fly easily. Spraying fragrance in your hand speed up smelling middle and bottom tones because of the heat of your hand (versus your cloths or that small paper they spray on in stores)
"The smell of bitter almonds is due to a compound called mandelonitrile, it falls apart in water giving an aldehyde and cyanide the famous murder novels poison. Now here's the real killer: both smell of bitter almonds! If there is a Creator, and It has a sense of humor, this would be the sort of thing It would dream up. If you want to understand smell, this one is real enigma: there is no structural similarly between them whatsoever. [one explanation] neatly accounted for by an evolutionary hypothesis, namely that since the two molecules always come together in almonds, we have learned to give them the same smell, this explanation begs the question of why we haven't done the same for the main components of rose etc."
"Ordinary odorants do not smell like the sum of their parts. Manu esters, by contrast, smell somewhat like A + B, though the AB and BA compounds will always smell different... Could it be that the esters are breaking down in the nose into their component parts, which are then separately smelled? If this is the case, does it apply to other odorants?"
"Benzoyl salicylate, one of the most wildly used esters in classic perfumery, has no smell at all to most people, and a very weak one to the rest. It is a stealthy raw material, capable of improving the richness and depth of floral compositions out of all proportion to its actual smell. Even perfumes who cannot smell it immediately detect its presence in a formula. It almost goes without saying that this phenomenon remains a complete enigma. Esters are transparent smells, watercolors for the nose, but they have close relatives that are more akin to pastels: the lactones. Lactones, coumarin among then, must be the cuddliest smells in all perfumery: almost every one is soft and powdery, sometimes to a fault"
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So how do our noses work? Receptors are proteins that are half submerged in cell and they work as communication channels. "The receptor protein grabs something [chemical signal, smell, adrenaline, etc.] in its hand on the outside, and move its feet on the inside to tell the cell that a message has arrived". And so far, it has been so difficult to understand and simulate how the sticking happens exactly. I think Alzheimer is related to this, where I think that brain cells receptors fade away. PS3 had an application that collectively million of PS3s and PCs simulate how protein folding (to enter the cell) happens exactly. As for smelling, when the signal affects the receptor, only a tiny (UNDETECTABLE by our current technology) change occurs in its structure.
Our noses have 347 families of receptors. So, is each receptor responsible for a particular smell? First of all, our eyes have only 3 receptors and yet we convince millions of vivid colors, google "eye receptors spectrum" to see how it works. The author gives the analogy of writing systems where in alphabetical writing systems we have small set of characters that when arranged in certain ways they make thousands of different words (just like our 3-letters eyes, or English's 26 characters), and ideographic writing systems where each character is a word (Chinese has over 50,000 characters). So is smelling Alphabetical (like our eyes) or Ideographic?
"Mix A and B and you get the smell of C... This thing happens all the time in perfumery, where for example mixing a few pure molecules gives you a striking approximation to, say, a flower's smell". The same happens with our eyes, screens mix green and red and yellow results, Vsauce made an amazing video about it called "This Is Not Yellow". I believe that the A + B = C of smells, similar to Green + Red = Yellow of colors, hints at smell receptors being "alphabetical".
Anyway, to me there are two essential questions (the author mixes it all up): How receptors get turned on? And how smells relate to on-receptors? The first question is the main argument of the book, is it by traditional view of shape or author's view of vibration (Infrared Spectroscopy, in other word low frequency waves) of the molecule? This is a very technical (Chemistry) problem. As for the second question, it seems from A + B = C that our receptors work like our eyes receptors. Oh I've just noticed something while comparing eyes to noses. Unlike our eyes, we only smell one bit of smell at a time. We can smell two smells at the same time and that is because this bit is complex, but it is only one bit. Our eyes have millions and millions of bits, we can see many colors simultaneously and know their location in front of us, but smelling (since it only has 1 bit) doesn't have "location", as if our nose is one big complex single eye receptor, so it's no wonder that our noses are very accurate in distinguishing many smells (to the point that a millionth molecule can make all the difference in a fancy fragrance) unlike my eyes where I can only distinguish between much fewer colors (anyone can fake the fancy Tiffany green/blue). And this makes sense because for us to smell, molecules of the thing we are about to smell need to fly up into our noses and get scattered all over inner surface of the nose, we can't tell if it came from one object or 100 objects in the room. And speaking of receptors, do you know why spicy food taste "hot" and mint taste "cool"? Because they trigger the same receptors as hot and cool temperatures.
The first question is so technical and I can't dare to argue about it (I'll need to understand it first, which I find hard so far even with the author's passionate explanation). But few interesting stuff: there are some molecules that force the receptor to be off, they are called antagonists, such as pain killers. "It is striking in many cases how little difference in structure exists between a strong ON and a strong OFF drug”.
In many chemical groups (aldehydes and others), the smell of a molecule is the sum of its parts. This is contradictory to A + B = C case in other molecules.
"Smell can neither be action at a distance nor chemical reaction of the odorant with the cells in our nose. The first point is clear because only things which evaporate have a smell, and the second because molecules like paraffins do have a smell and are otherwise quite inert chemically".
Isotopes are good test for first question, because we'll have two molecules with identical shapes and different vibrations, and they indeed smell differently!
On the other hand, different molecules (different shape but similar vibration), smell similarly. Vibration it is then. Case closed. Next up: understanding flavors and how the tongue works (enabling much more flexible synthetic flavors).
When the author figured out that isotopes smelled differently (which is contrary to long-held-yet-unsupported belief among scientists), which suggests smelling works on vibration not shape, "on the train, two young girls across the aisle were smelling perfumes on each other's wrists and I thought to myself: I know how that works".
"I believe that the nose faces a unique task that has required what may turn out to be a unique adaptation: detecting any molecule that comes its way. To do that, you need a system based on general physical principles rather than the specific interactions which we commonly call 'lock and key' [like antagonist pain killers]". In other words, the nose is a general computer that take an analog signal (molecule vibration), just like the eye which also takes an analog signal (electromagnetic wave -light-, also a vibration).
Believe it or not, Science is filled with jealousy, much worse than reality tv shows. I think it's understandable, since these scientists spend their lives in the labs working hard yet most of the time making not so much progress. It's a tradition that new ideas get strong resistance, especially from (ignorant) veterans in the field. Homer explored Rage, Academia explores Jealousy.
-----
The book gets really technical in most of the parts, but the author provides accessible analogies that really help non-specialists like me to understand. I really needed this brain-warmup, it's been almost 3 years since I graduated engineering college. However, reading this book made me a bit sad. I like reading Art books, but imagine if those didn't come with lovely pictures of beautiful paintings discussed by the author? Perfumes can't be faxed, and that is an inherited issue with smelling. I wish there was an online-purchasable set of fragrance samples that accompanies the book.
I loved the book, it's mind blowing and the author is awesome, "the other thing you hear when smell is mentioned in polite company is the question of whether fragrance works for the opposite sex the way shit works for flies", and "[when your smelling goes,] sex would still be OK, because your eyes, hands and ears ('I love it when..') would still work", keep in mind that this is a smell nerd (with a PhD) writing a non-fiction scientific book about his field of expertise, and what a language he uses!
I would just sniff around and discuss with people how sweet or how sharp or how fruity or how stingy their perfumes were. I needed to know the science behind it. Reading this book if you love perfumes is like learning music scales if you like music! I adore how poetic this scientific book is, Luca Turin is an artist (who happens to have a PhD in Biophysics).
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Some history about perfumery
"It was Nombre Noir that got me started on a long journey towards the secret of smell, a journey that would take fifteen years. The secret is this: though we now know almost everything there is to know about molecules, we don't know how our noses read them... Every time it is an absolute mystery what each molecule is going to smell like... What is this chemical alphabet that our noses read so effortlessly from birth? Part of the reason for the lack of interest in the subject must be that smell science products little that is useful to the sober pursuits of medicine and technology. There are few diseases of smell, and those that exist are usually incurable and get little sympathy. And though it is big business, fragrance is a low-tech frivolous and fickle world. The relative neglect of smell compared to other senses may also have to do with the fact that it cannot be easily transmitted like images and sound. As a colleague of mine put it, 'You still can't fax a perfume'", but that applies to taste (flavor) too, "possibly also, it is wrongly held to be less reliable as a sensation than vision or sound. Finally, there is a definite 'real men don't do this' side to smell and fragrance... Whatever the reasons, the cipher remains unbroken. This does not mean that people do not care. Everyone has wondered about the nature of odors from antiquity onwards. Smell was (rightly) taken as evidence for existence of atoms and (wrongly) for their having different shapes, some smooth (roses), some sharp-edged (mustard). Modern theories are only slightly different... Here I tell the story of how I think I finally cracked the code. Actually, as often happens, it had been cracked twice before by brilliant minds, but nobody took them seriously. All I did was extend their work, and this book is my tribute to their insights... There is a lot of money to be made by efficiently designing new fragrances and flavors", so yes fragrance and flavor have similar aspects.
Shockingly, "only 3% or so of the price in the shop is the smell. The rest is packaging, advertising and margins". And yet this 3% keeps shrinking and fragrance ingredients get cheaper and cheaper, to squeeze more profit pennies, damn you Capitalism!
Captives are one-in-a-millionth chemical compounds (yet they make half the smell, our noses are really sensitive) that make all the difference in very successful unmimkable (captives are very hard to scan chemically and usually patented) fragrances.
"There are no exact equivalents in smell... That's why the event is rare, and that's why we notice it... The uniqueness goes right down to the molecular level. As I've said, there are no synonyms: no two different compounds out of the hundreds of thousands made so far have identical smells", and that what makes fragrances so unique and rare and memorable.
Synthesized smells aren't bad, "natural" doesn't always mean good (they too complex to give room for creativity) and "chemical" does not always mean bad (they are simple thus boring, but they can be improved on into very unique and new things). Nature is good, but not perfect as most people assume. There isn't a cancer cure out there in Nature that waits to be discovered. Nature has poisonous beautiful (deception) flowers, and deadly bears (as Stephen Colbert says lol).
-----
General observations about smelling
"Our noses like short words... Roughly speaking, anything more than sixteen carbons stand a good chance of being odorless... Musk is exactly 16 Cs"
"The shorter the word, the shorter the smell. Short words are 'top/high notes', spray CSC on your skin and you will smell of truffles for thirty seconds. Every letter adds roughly a factor of two to the time. You will smell of cheap musk (16 Cs) for thirty hours or more, this would be a 'bottom' or 'drydown' note"
"Smelly molecules are made from only five types of atom: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and sulphur, these are also the five elements that make up all life"
"The molecules must be able to fly in order to reach our noses, so they should carry no charges that make them stick to each other"
"They should be as unreactive as possible"
"Most importantly: no two words smell the same. Smell of musk (16 Cs) when one C shorter will smell of cedar wood. There are plenty of siblings, but not exact twins in smell"
Smell becomes perfume, chemical poems. Many hundreds of such words make a perfume. Short words are the first to smell (and first to disappear) because they are light and fly easily. Spraying fragrance in your hand speed up smelling middle and bottom tones because of the heat of your hand (versus your cloths or that small paper they spray on in stores)
"The smell of bitter almonds is due to a compound called mandelonitrile, it falls apart in water giving an aldehyde and cyanide the famous murder novels poison. Now here's the real killer: both smell of bitter almonds! If there is a Creator, and It has a sense of humor, this would be the sort of thing It would dream up. If you want to understand smell, this one is real enigma: there is no structural similarly between them whatsoever. [one explanation] neatly accounted for by an evolutionary hypothesis, namely that since the two molecules always come together in almonds, we have learned to give them the same smell, this explanation begs the question of why we haven't done the same for the main components of rose etc."
"Ordinary odorants do not smell like the sum of their parts. Manu esters, by contrast, smell somewhat like A + B, though the AB and BA compounds will always smell different... Could it be that the esters are breaking down in the nose into their component parts, which are then separately smelled? If this is the case, does it apply to other odorants?"
"Benzoyl salicylate, one of the most wildly used esters in classic perfumery, has no smell at all to most people, and a very weak one to the rest. It is a stealthy raw material, capable of improving the richness and depth of floral compositions out of all proportion to its actual smell. Even perfumes who cannot smell it immediately detect its presence in a formula. It almost goes without saying that this phenomenon remains a complete enigma. Esters are transparent smells, watercolors for the nose, but they have close relatives that are more akin to pastels: the lactones. Lactones, coumarin among then, must be the cuddliest smells in all perfumery: almost every one is soft and powdery, sometimes to a fault"
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So how do our noses work? Receptors are proteins that are half submerged in cell and they work as communication channels. "The receptor protein grabs something [chemical signal, smell, adrenaline, etc.] in its hand on the outside, and move its feet on the inside to tell the cell that a message has arrived". And so far, it has been so difficult to understand and simulate how the sticking happens exactly. I think Alzheimer is related to this, where I think that brain cells receptors fade away. PS3 had an application that collectively million of PS3s and PCs simulate how protein folding (to enter the cell) happens exactly. As for smelling, when the signal affects the receptor, only a tiny (UNDETECTABLE by our current technology) change occurs in its structure.
Our noses have 347 families of receptors. So, is each receptor responsible for a particular smell? First of all, our eyes have only 3 receptors and yet we convince millions of vivid colors, google "eye receptors spectrum" to see how it works. The author gives the analogy of writing systems where in alphabetical writing systems we have small set of characters that when arranged in certain ways they make thousands of different words (just like our 3-letters eyes, or English's 26 characters), and ideographic writing systems where each character is a word (Chinese has over 50,000 characters). So is smelling Alphabetical (like our eyes) or Ideographic?
"Mix A and B and you get the smell of C... This thing happens all the time in perfumery, where for example mixing a few pure molecules gives you a striking approximation to, say, a flower's smell". The same happens with our eyes, screens mix green and red and yellow results, Vsauce made an amazing video about it called "This Is Not Yellow". I believe that the A + B = C of smells, similar to Green + Red = Yellow of colors, hints at smell receptors being "alphabetical".
Anyway, to me there are two essential questions (the author mixes it all up): How receptors get turned on? And how smells relate to on-receptors? The first question is the main argument of the book, is it by traditional view of shape or author's view of vibration (Infrared Spectroscopy, in other word low frequency waves) of the molecule? This is a very technical (Chemistry) problem. As for the second question, it seems from A + B = C that our receptors work like our eyes receptors. Oh I've just noticed something while comparing eyes to noses. Unlike our eyes, we only smell one bit of smell at a time. We can smell two smells at the same time and that is because this bit is complex, but it is only one bit. Our eyes have millions and millions of bits, we can see many colors simultaneously and know their location in front of us, but smelling (since it only has 1 bit) doesn't have "location", as if our nose is one big complex single eye receptor, so it's no wonder that our noses are very accurate in distinguishing many smells (to the point that a millionth molecule can make all the difference in a fancy fragrance) unlike my eyes where I can only distinguish between much fewer colors (anyone can fake the fancy Tiffany green/blue). And this makes sense because for us to smell, molecules of the thing we are about to smell need to fly up into our noses and get scattered all over inner surface of the nose, we can't tell if it came from one object or 100 objects in the room. And speaking of receptors, do you know why spicy food taste "hot" and mint taste "cool"? Because they trigger the same receptors as hot and cool temperatures.
The first question is so technical and I can't dare to argue about it (I'll need to understand it first, which I find hard so far even with the author's passionate explanation). But few interesting stuff: there are some molecules that force the receptor to be off, they are called antagonists, such as pain killers. "It is striking in many cases how little difference in structure exists between a strong ON and a strong OFF drug”.
In many chemical groups (aldehydes and others), the smell of a molecule is the sum of its parts. This is contradictory to A + B = C case in other molecules.
"Smell can neither be action at a distance nor chemical reaction of the odorant with the cells in our nose. The first point is clear because only things which evaporate have a smell, and the second because molecules like paraffins do have a smell and are otherwise quite inert chemically".
Isotopes are good test for first question, because we'll have two molecules with identical shapes and different vibrations, and they indeed smell differently!
On the other hand, different molecules (different shape but similar vibration), smell similarly. Vibration it is then. Case closed. Next up: understanding flavors and how the tongue works (enabling much more flexible synthetic flavors).
When the author figured out that isotopes smelled differently (which is contrary to long-held-yet-unsupported belief among scientists), which suggests smelling works on vibration not shape, "on the train, two young girls across the aisle were smelling perfumes on each other's wrists and I thought to myself: I know how that works".
"I believe that the nose faces a unique task that has required what may turn out to be a unique adaptation: detecting any molecule that comes its way. To do that, you need a system based on general physical principles rather than the specific interactions which we commonly call 'lock and key' [like antagonist pain killers]". In other words, the nose is a general computer that take an analog signal (molecule vibration), just like the eye which also takes an analog signal (electromagnetic wave -light-, also a vibration).
Believe it or not, Science is filled with jealousy, much worse than reality tv shows. I think it's understandable, since these scientists spend their lives in the labs working hard yet most of the time making not so much progress. It's a tradition that new ideas get strong resistance, especially from (ignorant) veterans in the field. Homer explored Rage, Academia explores Jealousy.
-----
The book gets really technical in most of the parts, but the author provides accessible analogies that really help non-specialists like me to understand. I really needed this brain-warmup, it's been almost 3 years since I graduated engineering college. However, reading this book made me a bit sad. I like reading Art books, but imagine if those didn't come with lovely pictures of beautiful paintings discussed by the author? Perfumes can't be faxed, and that is an inherited issue with smelling. I wish there was an online-purchasable set of fragrance samples that accompanies the book.
I loved the book, it's mind blowing and the author is awesome, "the other thing you hear when smell is mentioned in polite company is the question of whether fragrance works for the opposite sex the way shit works for flies", and "[when your smelling goes,] sex would still be OK, because your eyes, hands and ears ('I love it when..') would still work", keep in mind that this is a smell nerd (with a PhD) writing a non-fiction scientific book about his field of expertise, and what a language he uses!
November 15, 2017
The note my friend included in the book when she gave it to me: "I can never decide if this is completely crackpot or brilliant." So I approached it with curiosity and caution. Within the first pages, I knew what she meant. This book is like accidentally getting into a conversation with someone's self-aggrandizing cousin at a bar, and hearing him talk about movies and name drop celebrities and tell you where the best BEST place in the city is to get Pho. If you're not an expert on pho or the private lives of celebrities, you're at a disadvantage. And one ALWAYS feels at a disadvantage in this book. In one turn, he'll rattle off organic chemistry procedures and compounds (including writing out the formulae for them), and in the next, he'll make some bold claim about how 90% of commercial fragrances are total crap. He dismisses Poison as an assault on perfumery, never conceding the point that tastes differ. (It's like someone who dismisses California Chardonnay because ...because.)
The parts I liked were the in-depth explanations of how synthetic scents are developed, and how molecules evaporate and why some things smell the way they do, and isn't it surprising that Civet, which is basically the product of anal glands of wild cats, could possibly add the magic touch to some very popular mens' colognes. He skates over things like synesthesia and aesthetics in general, but doesn't dig deep.
Where he does dig deep is into a sort of history of the science of perfumery and chemistry (maybe some molecular biology). There's anecdote after anecdote of scientists accidentally discovering that explosive compounds smell sweet and you can replicate Sandalwood with x y and z compounds but it's still expensive. And there are several sections that read like chapters from a Chem 101 textbook. I skimmed those parts, so if there's some hidden genius there, I missed it.
This is the kind of book that really really needs a bibliography. There's enough about the style of the writing to throw me into doubt about the veracity of the details. There isn't a bibliography, which adds to the overall impression of "this dude at the bar..." style of writing. It left me wanting, but it had some interesting bits I'm not sure I trust. So yeah... can't decide if it's total crackpot or brilliant.
The parts I liked were the in-depth explanations of how synthetic scents are developed, and how molecules evaporate and why some things smell the way they do, and isn't it surprising that Civet, which is basically the product of anal glands of wild cats, could possibly add the magic touch to some very popular mens' colognes. He skates over things like synesthesia and aesthetics in general, but doesn't dig deep.
Where he does dig deep is into a sort of history of the science of perfumery and chemistry (maybe some molecular biology). There's anecdote after anecdote of scientists accidentally discovering that explosive compounds smell sweet and you can replicate Sandalwood with x y and z compounds but it's still expensive. And there are several sections that read like chapters from a Chem 101 textbook. I skimmed those parts, so if there's some hidden genius there, I missed it.
This is the kind of book that really really needs a bibliography. There's enough about the style of the writing to throw me into doubt about the veracity of the details. There isn't a bibliography, which adds to the overall impression of "this dude at the bar..." style of writing. It left me wanting, but it had some interesting bits I'm not sure I trust. So yeah... can't decide if it's total crackpot or brilliant.
March 24, 2025
3.5! Alright I’m gonna b real and say that a lot of the specific science details in this book went over my head. There were some passages that I understood with a rudimentary chem-bio knowledge but even those could have functioned better without creating imprecise, near-euphemistic metaphors in order to presumably avoid using too much science jargon for the layperson reader. Which is weird because this book does still touch on more challenging material, and includes diagrams + footnotes…Might as well use more specific terms for clarity rather than gesture in the general direction of a science concept…🤨
I think for me the main science takeaways are solidified, and it’s interesting to track the history of understanding olfaction thru scientific study/building theories. It’s fun to read about ~scientist culture~ haha I guess you could call it, as a non-scientist, although the last 1/3 of the book gets kinda tedious with details.
I love Turin’s intense love for perfume / fragrance that is clear in his romantic descriptions of scents. The blend of creative/cultural/evocative with the physics-chem-bio tiny scale of molecular interactions is really compelling and overall this book was rly interesting and a fun read as a beginner perfume-enjoyer with low-level intro science education :) I did learn a lot of random facts, and gained a new appreciation for functional fragrance chemists haha. Overall happy I picked this up and idk who I would specifically recommend it to but it’s a fun read for sensual nerds!
I want to read Turin’s other books and give The Emperor of Scent a try…
I think for me the main science takeaways are solidified, and it’s interesting to track the history of understanding olfaction thru scientific study/building theories. It’s fun to read about ~scientist culture~ haha I guess you could call it, as a non-scientist, although the last 1/3 of the book gets kinda tedious with details.
I love Turin’s intense love for perfume / fragrance that is clear in his romantic descriptions of scents. The blend of creative/cultural/evocative with the physics-chem-bio tiny scale of molecular interactions is really compelling and overall this book was rly interesting and a fun read as a beginner perfume-enjoyer with low-level intro science education :) I did learn a lot of random facts, and gained a new appreciation for functional fragrance chemists haha. Overall happy I picked this up and idk who I would specifically recommend it to but it’s a fun read for sensual nerds!
I want to read Turin’s other books and give The Emperor of Scent a try…
August 22, 2021
Very very accessible to non-scientists. As a science grad it was a bit slow and fluffy in some areas, and I felt that the science and some of the analytical techniques could have been written in a more technical way so laymen could come away with a deeper understanding and not such a surface “pop” knowledge.
Some of the metaphors and descriptions are a bit forced, and references to sex or the authors own academic and charismatic desirability were shoe-horned in. I feel although the theory of vibrational interaction between chemicals and scent receptors was touched upon, it would have been nice to (maybe in an annex or something) go further into the methods, the techniques, the further testing, how the 9 out of 10 duds smelt compared to the compound he was trying to copy. How close was the 1 out of 10 success? The final few pages were where my interest piqued, as he rounds of the potential further study and how this theory is unlikely to apply to other receptors in the body. It’s an insightful book and was nice to engage with bioscience once again after a wee break. Which it was at a slightly higher level though… and less self fellatio.
Oh and there is a weird romanticised theme of colonisation that runs through this. Weird.
Some of the metaphors and descriptions are a bit forced, and references to sex or the authors own academic and charismatic desirability were shoe-horned in. I feel although the theory of vibrational interaction between chemicals and scent receptors was touched upon, it would have been nice to (maybe in an annex or something) go further into the methods, the techniques, the further testing, how the 9 out of 10 duds smelt compared to the compound he was trying to copy. How close was the 1 out of 10 success? The final few pages were where my interest piqued, as he rounds of the potential further study and how this theory is unlikely to apply to other receptors in the body. It’s an insightful book and was nice to engage with bioscience once again after a wee break. Which it was at a slightly higher level though… and less self fellatio.
Oh and there is a weird romanticised theme of colonisation that runs through this. Weird.
January 22, 2024
This is neither a good science book (let alone scientific) nor a fun read. Maybe a shitty sloppy pop science at best with so many lame ass opinions of the author (in form of jokes or analogies)
Not a single diagram or picture (of molecules, formulas, etc)in this book has a caption or a label, while its above or below paragraph may discuss 4 forms of molecules.
I don’t understand how this guy is a biophysicist because it looks like he never wrote a scientific paper or read one. So as his editors. So sloppy and such an immature text.
Someone interested in olfactory science may actually benefit more from wikipedia searches than this book. If you also come from an academic background you should stay away cause it will piss you the f* off.
Not a single diagram or picture (of molecules, formulas, etc)in this book has a caption or a label, while its above or below paragraph may discuss 4 forms of molecules.
I don’t understand how this guy is a biophysicist because it looks like he never wrote a scientific paper or read one. So as his editors. So sloppy and such an immature text.
Someone interested in olfactory science may actually benefit more from wikipedia searches than this book. If you also come from an academic background you should stay away cause it will piss you the f* off.
April 9, 2025
If you understand chemistry and have a profound interest in the art of perfumery you are in for a treat.
If you don't know the first thing about chemistry you may find yourself lost at sea.
I'm in the second group. My interest in the art of perfumery and having read Luca previously led me to this book. At times, my brain was nowhere to be found reading this but not in an unpleasant way. I don't mind reading more technical stuff from areas I know nothing about and Luca does a noticeable effort to make it accessible. My problem is sustaining interest when it goes longer than my brain tolerates that particular day.
I know a lot more now than I did before and that's great. Great info, great writing.
If you don't know the first thing about chemistry you may find yourself lost at sea.
I'm in the second group. My interest in the art of perfumery and having read Luca previously led me to this book. At times, my brain was nowhere to be found reading this but not in an unpleasant way. I don't mind reading more technical stuff from areas I know nothing about and Luca does a noticeable effort to make it accessible. My problem is sustaining interest when it goes longer than my brain tolerates that particular day.
I know a lot more now than I did before and that's great. Great info, great writing.
November 13, 2025
We thought the science in this book was difficult to get through due to it being technically advanced and the author’s writing not being very interesting. We thought the author was eccentric and had some interesting lore but could come off as self-important. The combo of these two aspects confused us because we weren't sure who the audience of this book was? People who already have a deep understanding of chemistry or casual perfume/pop science fans. Ideally a good Science Book Club book could be enjoyed by both, but we can't imagine this book being enjoyed by either. The science behind smell is extremely fascinating and mysterious, but this book was not helpful in understanding it.
December 7, 2025
Extremely niche read for the fragrance fixated.
Quick note on formatting: the minimized break between sections makes this book feel like a long paper which is not the worst but just unorthodox and maybe speaks to the authors experience in the research field.
Overall very intriguing discussion on theories of scent. The section which explores the web of scent molecules by structure is just so cool.
The plot goes vague in the last 50 pages as Turin ties in other theories but is nicely collected at the end with a hopeful look at the future of scent and science as a whole.
Quick note on formatting: the minimized break between sections makes this book feel like a long paper which is not the worst but just unorthodox and maybe speaks to the authors experience in the research field.
Overall very intriguing discussion on theories of scent. The section which explores the web of scent molecules by structure is just so cool.
The plot goes vague in the last 50 pages as Turin ties in other theories but is nicely collected at the end with a hopeful look at the future of scent and science as a whole.
February 7, 2023
The subject of this book is really interesting, and Luca Turin is a good writer. I gave four stars because the book was entertaining and informative. However, he has a pretentious and somewhat sarcastic tone throughout the book; while occasionally funny, more often I found myself annoyed with his superior attitude. That being said, if you're interested in the subject, this is really the best book to read on olfactory science.
January 6, 2024
The first half of this book is 5 stars. Luca Turin writes beautifully about scent, smell and perfume. The second half is a lot more heavy handed with the chemistry and is more of a literature review focused on arriving at his own theory and how well it works, which might appear convincing if it weren’t obviously heavily biased, so I can only take it with a grain of salt until I learn more on the topic.
February 23, 2021
The first half of the book i.e. the classification of molecules/smells is really nice and informative. I wish more nonfiction books had this much detail. Very well written, too. The second half is kind of scattered, this history-of-an-idea plot hard to grasp for a non-scientist. Still it was a weirdly enthralling read, I think now I'm gonna read EVERYTHING Luca Turin has written.
December 22, 2017
Perfume and chemistry? I don't think that this book has university appeal but I liked it. I loved the parts about perfume and was fascinated by both the controversial science of scent molecules themselves and also the political drama involved in academic publishing.
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