The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell. This item is unavailable.The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell

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 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.