Book comments - The Secret of Scent by Luca Turin

The bad weather for the last few weeks here caused me to look for new ways to entertain myself. The thought of leaving the house during daylight hours was impossible, and the heat generated by a computer or TV meant I was loathe to switch either item on. Basically I ended up going over my many books and starting to read ones that I'd bought and for one reason or another, not read.

I remember purchasing The Secret of Scent thinking it was going to tell me the technical ways perfumes are put together (the combination of oils, alcohols, etc) and how they work on our brains and stimulate memory but instead found that it seemed instead to be on organic chemistry and physics.

Anyway, I decided to give it another go and while biochemistry is still not the most rivetting of subjects (to me), the real strength of TSOS is Turin's writing, which is similar to what my own writing has been called - unscientific. For example, he describes the academic's search for funding in these words: "I was an academic scientist living in a world where money, like sexually transmitted diseases and car accidents, is something that only happens to other people, and not very prudent ones at that." Later on, he describes the scent of a gardenia as "...so perfectly pretty from every angle it almost hurts, like early pictures of Audrey Hepburn."

The text is also littered with random tidbits of information that would appeal if you, like me, are acting as a receptacle of useless knowledge. Did you know that when a molecule has more than 16 carbons it in, the less likely it is to have a scent that we're able to detect? Also, the first synthetic musk came from experiments involving and is very similar to TNT? Wow!!!

So if you're a nerd or are interested in some irreverent phrasing, this is a pretty interesting book. But if you don't like organic chemistry or physics, then give it a pass.