The Secret of Scent
Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell

I was really interested in this book because I consider myself a supersmeller and love to read about the science behind things. But I started reading and quickly became disappointed with it. It's not a good book, it's not well written, and only maybe 5% of it is interesting at all. As someone who ha......more

Turin is something of an olfactory mutant, possessing a preternaturally fine-tuned sense of smell and an almost freakish ability to translate scents into verbal terms. Consider his Proustian description of a peach base composed by Pierre Nuyens: "It is a peach played slowly, an arpeggiato chord that......more

I read a book about Turin (The Emperor of Scent) that I really enjoyed, so I was excited to find this on my library shelf. Turin puts me in mind of Feynman in both erudition and wry hilarity. This scientist can write circles around most writers. The topic, the biological mechanisms by which we perce......more

Pompous with irrelevant comparisons and descriptions. The endless stream of unnecessary anecdotes and references makes this book a bore, half the time I was unsure how the paragraphs had anything to do with each other, and completely goes by the point of explaining to the reader how odours and smell......more

This book is about smell. Which i LOVE. Yet the most generous i can be with it is that it was bizarre. The first half was a real struggle to get through b/c the author is kind of an ass and says some appallingly non-scientific (and actually false) things, especially considering he's a scientist. The......more