Book Information
Book: Kaori no Tanoshimi, Nioi no Himitsu (Japanese title, translated here as The Pleasures of Scent, the Secrets of Smell)
(Original title: The Secret of Scent)
Author: Luca Turin
Publication year: 2006 (Japanese translation: 2008)
Publisher: Kawade Shobo Shinsha
The secret of smell is that, although almost everything there is to discover about odor molecules is known, we do not know how the nose reads their smells.
Luca Turin
Book Review
To study smell, we must leave the world of beauty and, in the realm that German philosophers once called the sublime, confront the irreducible mystery of raw sensation.
Luca Turin
The author, Luca Turin, fell in love with Nombre Noir, the legendary perfume released by Serge Lutens during the Shiseido years, and became obsessed with one particular mystery.
“How do we perceive smells?”
It is one of the ultimate mysteries that humanity has yet to explain fully and precisely.
Drawing on self-taught knowledge of chemistry and physics, and on a naturally acute sense of smell, Turin developed a theory to unravel the mystery of olfaction. This was the vibration theory, the startling idea that brought Turin’s name to wider attention through Chandler Burr’s account in The Emperor of Scent (in Japanese).
As of 2021, Turin’s vibration theory had not been completely disproved, and it apparently remained a source of heated debate among researchers studying olfaction.
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