Subtitled ‘Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell’, Luca Turin’s book has the potential to be fascinating, explaining – or at least attempting to – how scientists in labs recreate the smell of flowers, musks and fruits. It’s a lucrative business as the perfumes are then bottled, marketed with the help of some gorgeous celeb and bought by millions worldwide. From the outside, the world of perfume seems glamorous, exotic and sexy; but once you reduce it to molecular structures, atomic weights and the Nobel-winning findings of lesser-known Croatian chemists, it all becomes rather laborious and dull.
There are pages of incomprehensible diagrams, and it’s not always clear which part of the text they’re illustrating. Also, molecular chemists have come up with their own language called SMILES (aren’t they a hoot?), and if you’re unfamiliar with it, you’ll gain as little from the sentence ‘OC(=O)CC[C@] (n:c(=O)’ as I did.
I really did try with this book, but even after enlisting the help of an Oxford physics MA I had to concede defeat in the face of so much presumed knowledge.
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