The title of Chandler Burr’s bestseller, The Emperor of Scent, suggests the amazing gift of smell of its main character, Luca Turin. Turin is endowed with a phenomenal talent enabling him to recognize the different molecules which make up the essence of a perfume. He is also a brilliant biophysicist who develops a new theory about smell. Chandler Burr unravels the incredible true story unleashed by this discovery.
From the very beginning, Luca Turin has to face two adversaries. First the lethal jealousy and nasty back-stabbing of the world’s top researchers backed by powerful labs vying for a Nobel Prize. Second, the utter amazement of the perfume industry which feels threatened by this new discovery which may cost thousands of jobs.
Chandler Burr acknowledges that he began this book “as the simple story of the creation of a scientific theory. But I continued it with the growing awareness that it was, in fact, a larger, more complex story of scientific corruption, corruption in the most mundane and systemic and virulent and sadly human of jealousy and calcified mind and vested interests. That it was a scientific morality tale.”
After an extraordinary turn of events, the prestigious scientific magazine, Nature, refuses to publish Luca’s theory on smell. In the meantime, he has written a Perfume Guide which becomes an instant best-seller in France probably because nothing like it has ever been done before. Luca found it to be one of the single greatest pleasures of his life: “You know, perhaps the edge I have in turning smell into language is that for me, smell has always had an utterly solid reality that, to my utter astonishment, it doesn’t seem to have for other people. Every perfume I’ve ever smelled has been to me like a movie, sound and vision, which to most people are thoroughly real senses but not smell. To me, smell is just as real as they are,” explains Turin. He describes Yves Saint Laurent’s famous perfume Rive Gauche as “the true emblem of the 70’s, this sumptuous reinterpretation of the innovative metallic note ...belongs to the uncrowded category of sculpture perfumes. Its seamless silvery form, initially hidden by white, powdery notes, soon pierces the clouds and gains height by the hour. Like Chamade (Guerlain), Rive Gauche enjoys a peculiar relationship with intensity: The more time passes, the stronger its grace becomes, as if fading allowed its inner light to radiate more easily. A masterpiece. A notable example of the perfect agreement between container and content, its atomizer of metal and blue stripes, at once precious and whimsically “industrial “ is itself an item of undying chic.”
He finds out “unbelievable. Incredibly strong, first of all. It knocks you over, clubs you like a falling stone. But its vast dimension is what astonishes: A huge smell, spatially immense, and incredibly complex, a buttery layer as deep as a quarry, spicy without being a spice. “ Luca Turin is not only attracted by perfumes, he also enjoys the smell of strong cheese: “Your taste in smell is part biology and part culture. Everyone who smells rotten cheese the first time — take Epoisses, for example, reacts in different ways. When they smell it, Americans think, ‘Good God ‘. The Japanese think: “I must now commit suicide.’ The French think, ‘Where’s the bread? “
If the scientific explanations are somewhat tedious at times, Luca’s extraordinary character, his genial gift for perfume and the nasty back-stabbing triggered by his new theory of smell make this true story a wonderful book to read, one that you will not put down until you finish it!
Luca Turin’s Perfume Guide introduces him, inadvertently, to the “sealed, well-hidden world of those who create perfumes.” Led by the inspired and impassioned Burr, the reader penetrates, with utter delight, into the Fort Knox of these industrial giants. Six huge companies which the author nicknames the Big Boys operate in blissful anonymity. Their names never appear on the products for which they provide the scent. Their employees create the smell track of our everyday lives, they concoct the scent for Tide, Palmolive soap, the fabric softener that reminds us of springtime which we hardly notice but for which we pay billions of dollars.
These professional ghosts also create the perfumes for the world’s most famous fashion houses Ralph Lauren, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Giorgio Armani, Christian Dior to name but a few. “We want the smell of old melting candles in ballrooms of Italian marble during a Chinese winter “ and the perfumers transform these briefs, these visions into an olfactory medley of neutrons, protons and electrons, a signature perfume which will be eventually be worn by thousands of men and women.
The Emperor of Scent
By Chandler Burr
PP. 480, Arrow Books
