Happy National Book Lovers Day! Most unfortunately it’s also Monday. What fragrance are you wearing? (And what book are you reading?)
I’m in Acqua di Parma Iris Nobile, in the original Eau de Toilette. And I’m in the middle of three books: The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson, Autumn by Ali Smith and Something Fresh (the first in the Blandings Castle series) by PG Wodehouse.
Reminder: 8/13 is Alfred Hitchcock’s birthday (and Friday the 13th)…
The findings, published in Nature, reveal that olfactory receptors indeed follow a logic rarely seen in other receptors of the nervous system. While most receptors are precisely shaped to pair with only a few select molecules in a lock-and-key fashion, most olfactory receptors each bind to a large number of different molecules. Their promiscuity in pairing with a variety of odors allows each receptor to respond to many chemical components. From there, the brain can figure out the odor by considering the activation pattern of combinations of receptors.
— Neuroscientist (and MacArthur Fellow) Vanessa Ruta and her colleagues have published The structural basis of odorant recognition in insect olfactory receptors. Read more in New Research Reveals How Smell Receptors Work – Answers Decades-Old Question of Odor Recognition at SciTechDaily, or see a longer article (Secret Workings of Smell Receptors Revealed for First Time) at Quanta magazine.
A repeat of a poll we did in 2011, 2014, 2017 and 2019: tell us about your most-hated perfume, your most recent scrubber, nasty layering combinations you’ve discovered, perfumes you’d prefer to never smell again, or anything like.
Please, DO NOT read the comments if you’re at all sensitive about your own perfume loves. Someone else is bound to hate them! If you do read, be gracious about other people’s choices. This is meant to be lighthearted…
If Dalí painted melting clocks with these same landscapes in the background, then Mr. Collado has made the scent of this scenery his subject. He harvests rockrose, a Mediterranean shrub with evergreen leaves and white petals. He makes a tincture out of sea fennel, an edible plant that has a salty tang recalling the ocean.
He mixes these and other scents together to produce Cala, a fragrance he sells.
— Ernesto Collado leads smelling tours in Catalonia and sells his own creations at Bravanariz. Read more in Fragrance Maker Dares to Sniff ‘What Life Really Smells Like’ at The New York Times.
Ten minutes of Tibetan chanting by the Gyoto Monks, of his Holiness the Dalai Lama. This performance took place in at Lush Studio Soho (possibly in 2017).