The Secret of Scent - Hardcover

Luca Turin

3.75

830 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571215378 ISBN 13: 9780571215379

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 2006

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"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.

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About the Author:

Luca Turin was born in 1953 and educated in France, Italy and the UK. He holds a Ph.D. in biophysics from the University of London and was for 10 years a tenured staff member of the French CNRS. He is the author of many scientific publications as well as a much-praised perfume guide. For seven years he was Lecturer in Biophysics at University College London. He now designs scent molecules for a US startup company, Flexitral, using the scientific process described in this book. He is the subject of an award-winning BBC Horizon documentary and a biography, The Emperor of Scent.

From Booklist:

Scientists who can poetically convey the worth of their research are rare individuals indeed. Many, in fact, migrate to the professional writer's life, such as Oliver Sacks and Michael Crichton. Turin, already the subject of a previous book (Chandler Burr's The Emperor of Scent, 2003), not only demystifies the "hows" of smell but also chronicles his own discoveries and pays generous homage to others'. Curious beauty noses will sniff out the origins of such famed fragrances as Chanel N5, Opium, and the ever-widening world of musks. [...] The writing, when not tangled up in chemical-compound jargon, sparkles; who could not chuckle at his description of an allergy waiting to happen: "soap powder is, this side of a blowtorch, one of the harshest environments to put fragrance"? Barbara Jacobs
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