Luca Turin, author of Perfumes: The Guide and The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell, talks about the science of scent at TedTalks. Taped in 2005. A warning to the severely science-challenged: watching the whole 16 minutes may cause your brain to burst. You can read more about the aromachemicals developed by Flexitral at their website.
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Lovely! Thank you so much for posting the clip–it was very stimulating to get a chemistry lecture at 8 am in the morning. I used to get all the time when I was doing pre-med. (Yup, lovely geeky jokes bring back so many memories. Love the NY “good neighbourhood” reference: truth be told organic chemistry plays with very limited elements in the element table.)
Now if I remember correctly this is the theory Turin mentioned at the beginning of his book? I have longed been a believer of the shape theory (a variant of the lock and key / enzyme-receptor theory no doubt) but I'm glad Turin is changing my mind. I have to watch the chemical pathways again but the idea of the nose embedding a spectrocope is fascinating. Could the neuro-receptors in our olfactory system somehow allows this to take place? Turin didn't get into the neurological anatomy side of things but I think it shall probably the next step if he wishes to expand on the theory.
I'm still not sure if Beyond Paradise is my kind of floral perfection but at least Turin's lecture on hexenol is lovely–thankfully he left out the stereochemistry…that would have been a bit confusing.
Have a great day!
Oops…just watched the hexenol part again–Turin did put the stereochemistry in there when he labeled the chemical. I stand corrected.
So glad you enjoyed it — I watched it late last night and I'm afraid it sucked what brain power I had left right out of my head, and I went to sleep entirely stupid.
Yes, and also the theory described in Chandler Burr's book about Turin, The Emperor of Scent.
Don't worry about the stuff sucking your brain power–I was entirely hopeless when I started learning this stuff. It really times for things to sink in.
Oh, I'm not at all worried, and frankly, I'm not really trying to understand it in any great detail either. I vaguely get the basic argument between shape & vibration, but it's way outside of my area of interest and I don't care to understand it any more than I already do. If Luca Turin didn't also talk about perfume, it frankly wouldn't interest me at all. There, how's that for determined ignorance?
I applaud your choice! Of course you don't have to care for it if it is outside of your interest. And frankly I wouldn't care for it either if it isn't perfumery.
I guess the bottom line is that the new theory makes the perfumer's job a little easier, though I doubt master perfumers would spend hours labouring away on such stuff. Anyhow, thanks again for the interesting clip.
This was fun for my first-thing today, too. Watching and hearing him explain made things a bit more comprehensible for me than reading it.
Best thing was it finally made me become a member of TED!
I'm not sure if it has made anyone's job any easier or not — that is, I don't know if it's had any kind of widespread effect on how the fragrance industry goes about making new aromachemicals.
TED is great. You can also get their video podcasts via iTunes.
Chemistry was the one course I ever failed, and yet I found that strangely entertaining! I'm still puzzling over something he said at the beginning, however — that if we all experienced smells differently, perfumery wouldn't be an art. Aren't our differing perceptions precisely what DOES make it an art and not a science?
Hi AlbertCAN,
I always thought that enantiomers, of different shapes but same vibration, could be easily differentiated by smell. I would have liked Turin to address this. I'm sure the scientific community aren't ignoring him deliberately, they just need a substantial amount of evidence before they can accept a theory. In fact, I think there's been work published showing that vibration can't be the whole story when it comes to olfaction, and shape must play an important part. I'll try and dig it up if you are interested.
Robin – I agree that knowing this stuff isn't at all necessary to appreciate a perfume. You don't need to know about rods and cones in the eye to appreciate a Caravaggio! But it is quite interesting to me as I'm a scientist, so thanks for putting it up
I think many perfumistas probably wouldn't care at all if it wasn't Turin doing the talking!
Farah
My take on it was that to create an artefact you have to have universal tools: I guess if you didn't have universal tools, how could the artist get his message across? If we didn't all recognise colours in the same way, maybe we wouldn't be able to see the same paintings. From talking to each other, you know we are seeing the same paintings, we just feel differently about what we see.
Oops sorry, just read this comment after writing the first one. Yes I thought that would be the case and it is perfectly understandable!
That's a good explanation, thanks. I think the problem w/ scent is that selective anosmias are so prevalent — it isn't at all clear to me that we're really all smelling the same thing, and beyond that, personally I think body chemistry plays a somewhat greater role than LT thinks it does. Still, none of that really refutes the original point.
Glad you enjoyed it! And so agree, most perfumistas, myself included, couldn't give a fig if it wasn't Turin.
Thanks so much for the explanation. I don't entirely buy that we perceive things the same way, whether it's sight or smell, but I question it more from a philosophical stance (the Veil of Perception and all that) than a physical/biological one. Still, I get that we wouldn't even be able to discuss a painting or a perfume with others if we didn't have some sort of common ground of perception. In any case, thanks for making me think!
I want his job tooo!! i'm an undergrad chemist and a budding perfumista and now i kno wat my calling in life is!! who knew that chemistry and prefumery (is that a word?? hmm…) could co-exist in such a world!!
Perfumery, yes, is a word! And hope you'll get your dream job then