Many weeks ago I posted about an article that was to appear in Fantastic Man magazine (a quarterly mag that I find brilliant) on Luca Turin. Mr. Turin continues to either delight and/or annoy many Basenoter’s. It was with much anticipation that I finally found a copy of FM magazine and quickly devoured the article.
I've reprinted the first section of the article below (Part 1 of 3) and will post 2 other threads in the following days. It’s a quite long article/interview and entirely too much information and comments for just one thread.
The strange indentation at the beginning of each new paragraph (and the here-and-there capitalization of some proper words and names) are not done by me, but are parts of the way articles are laid out in FM magazine. Strangely quirky, I think - which is part of FM’s visual appeal.
BTW – the article also had some photographs of Mr. Turin in his cluttered office, literally strewn with over 600 bottles of fragrances in bookshelves surrounding him. I’ll include them in a later post.
My favorite parts, from this part of the article are 1. His references to the Hitchcock film in describing one of the new Chanel’s are so ‘dramatic’…classic Turin-speak.
2. The way he describes how a quality scent has top notes that frame the scene for the mid notes and dry down...lovely description...
Author: Susie Rushton
Magazine: Fantastic Man
Contact: www.fantasticmanmagazine.com (If you like this article, why don't you support FM magazine and buy a copy on newstands now, or even better subscribe - I am in no way affiliated with the magazine, just an admiring fan and FM reader)
Part 1 below:
The esteemed biophysicist and perfume critic Mr. LUCA TURIN was already somewhat of an outlaw in his field for his outrageously complicated theory of the human sense of smell. Then last year he published his popular-science exploration THE SECRET OF SCENT, a hilarious and enchanting trip through the world of odorous molecules. Mr. TURIN has successfully turned his deep-seated fascination for perfumes into an enviable profession. And along the way he has built up an international following of fans for his perfume critiques in the NEUE ZURCHER ZEITUNG, the Swiss quality daily founded on January 12,1780…
“Perfectly normal" is how LUCA TURIN describes his sense of smell. He sniffs at the little patch of CHANEL’S 31 RUE CAMBON that he has just sprayed on the back of his hand. We are reclining, a bit awkwardly, on a red sofa in the living room of his comfortable town in Camden, North London. It's Saturday morning and there's a scattering of kids' toys on the floor.
“You know in REAR WINDOW when GRACE KELLY barges in - he's sitting by the window with his leg in plaster- and when she walks in, everyone in the audience, male and female, feels a pang of pain because so much beauty hurts. Well..." (sniff) "to me, this thing hurts. Oh God."
TURIN tends to call fragrances 'things’ perhaps to downplay how much he loves them. "There is an assumption that real men aren't interested in smell and perfume. Well I consider that to be an opportunity." Italian by passport, born to Italian-Argentinean parents in 1953, raised in France and for the past 15 years resident in Britain. TURIN describes himself as 'Early European". He speaks English with an East Coast American accent that suits his characteristic enthusiasm just as well as his sardonic asides. It's been said that he resembles GIANNI VERSACE. The fashion designer didn't have TURIN'S height, but perhaps they have a similar squared profile and friendly brown eyes. When Turin is really enjoying a smell, you notice that his eyes become round and unblinking with pleasure.
To me it smells like DIORESSENCE, which was a landmark," TURIN continues rapidly, "although strictly speaking it wasn't a landmark - but in any event, it has the chypre base from CUIR DE RUSSIE but also something of YVES SAINT LAURENT’S CHAMPAGNE..." He waves a pointed finger in the air.
As unlikely as it might seem to anybody who has read any of his gripping DUFT-NOTE columns in the NEUE ZURCHER ZEITUNG, TURIN insists that until a motorbike courier delivered this new CHANEL scent the previous week, he'd all but sickened of them.
\t"I always think I hate perfume and then the next day a fragrance arrives that makes me change my mind. That's what happened with this insanely great thing."
While the fragrance industry manipulates a widely held perception that scents are mysterious and somehow unknowable, TURIN is an arbiter nonpareil. To him, perfume is not an accessory to seduction but an art form, comparable to a painting or a symphony. On snatching a little of a scent's vapours with his nose, after just a few seconds TURIN can sketch out its genealogy, then render palpable its unseen loveliness, or horror, with metaphors that leave one in a synaesthetic daze. It is this facility that makes his opinions more interesting than those of a mere connoisseur.
\tFor instance, at one point, we are discussing the commonly held belief that fragrances behave variably on different skins. "I've always said that's bollocks and sales patter. But recently,” and suddenly he's as grave as if he were speaking from behind a lectern - "I've come to the realization that top notes, what you get in the first two minutes, are affected by skin type."
\tOh, the top notes. I always want to get them over and done with.
\t"I agree. On the other hand, there are different kinds of top notes. There are the fragrances where they've spent all their money on the top notes,"
\tCan you give an example?
\tAlmost every modern fragrance. They have 85 dollars for the formula and they spend 83-and-a-half on the first five minutes. So the beginning is like a fairground ride. And then it just dies. Then, there is the second kind, the classical top notes, which are like an opera curtain embroidered with a bucolic scene, and you can hear the set being moved about backstage. That's CHAMADE by GUERLAIN or any of the 1960s French classics. Then the curtain goes up and there's a beautifully lit interior with a window on a meadow. And that's top notes literally as a curtain in front of the structure of a fragrance."
Most people find it difficult to describe smells, I say.
\t"Well, I’m delighted to hear that" he says, flatly, "I hope it stays that way." He often uses musical metaphors. Do you have any musical talents? "None whatsoever, but I'm a terrific listener," says TURIN, who prefers a soundtrack of anything "lyrical or elegiac" while he works, reserving special praise for the contemporary composer HOWARD SKEMPTON. "But as WALTER PATER said, all art aspires to the condition of music, and I agree, enthusiastically."
His ability to portray the scent-smelling experience - its emotion, logarithmic nature and sophistication-with figurative expressions can make the technical descriptions of fragrance (woody ambers and so forth) nonsensical by comparison.
\t"Well, it's like somebody saying, ‘this symphony contains cellos'," says TURIN, "Don't they all? That's a technical description of a perfume. ‘Contains cellos and violins.’ Terrific. But what's the fucking tune?"
TURIN tells a story about visiting the nose FRANCOISE CARON at the offices of QUEST, one of the six largest fragrance houses that supply fashion labels and celebrity brands with their perfumes. She asks him to smell a new fragrance she is working on for ESCADA and he says that it reminds him of a silk that changes colour as it's tilted in the light. CARON gives TURIN a weird look and, from a drawer, produces the brief given to her, which reads: a silk in two tones.
\t"I have this way of connecting perfume to other things, and it makes it easier for people to understand. But it's not what you're saying; it's that you're saying it at all. I think a lot of people must have had strong feelings about perfume but hadn’t articulated them. So when they see somebody articulating them, it legitimizes them. It's a permission. I'm just opening a door."
I've reprinted the first section of the article below (Part 1 of 3) and will post 2 other threads in the following days. It’s a quite long article/interview and entirely too much information and comments for just one thread.
The strange indentation at the beginning of each new paragraph (and the here-and-there capitalization of some proper words and names) are not done by me, but are parts of the way articles are laid out in FM magazine. Strangely quirky, I think - which is part of FM’s visual appeal.
BTW – the article also had some photographs of Mr. Turin in his cluttered office, literally strewn with over 600 bottles of fragrances in bookshelves surrounding him. I’ll include them in a later post.
My favorite parts, from this part of the article are 1. His references to the Hitchcock film in describing one of the new Chanel’s are so ‘dramatic’…classic Turin-speak.
2. The way he describes how a quality scent has top notes that frame the scene for the mid notes and dry down...lovely description...Author: Susie Rushton
Magazine: Fantastic Man
Contact: www.fantasticmanmagazine.com (If you like this article, why don't you support FM magazine and buy a copy on newstands now, or even better subscribe - I am in no way affiliated with the magazine, just an admiring fan and FM reader)
Part 1 below:
The esteemed biophysicist and perfume critic Mr. LUCA TURIN was already somewhat of an outlaw in his field for his outrageously complicated theory of the human sense of smell. Then last year he published his popular-science exploration THE SECRET OF SCENT, a hilarious and enchanting trip through the world of odorous molecules. Mr. TURIN has successfully turned his deep-seated fascination for perfumes into an enviable profession. And along the way he has built up an international following of fans for his perfume critiques in the NEUE ZURCHER ZEITUNG, the Swiss quality daily founded on January 12,1780…
“Perfectly normal" is how LUCA TURIN describes his sense of smell. He sniffs at the little patch of CHANEL’S 31 RUE CAMBON that he has just sprayed on the back of his hand. We are reclining, a bit awkwardly, on a red sofa in the living room of his comfortable town in Camden, North London. It's Saturday morning and there's a scattering of kids' toys on the floor.
“You know in REAR WINDOW when GRACE KELLY barges in - he's sitting by the window with his leg in plaster- and when she walks in, everyone in the audience, male and female, feels a pang of pain because so much beauty hurts. Well..." (sniff) "to me, this thing hurts. Oh God."
TURIN tends to call fragrances 'things’ perhaps to downplay how much he loves them. "There is an assumption that real men aren't interested in smell and perfume. Well I consider that to be an opportunity." Italian by passport, born to Italian-Argentinean parents in 1953, raised in France and for the past 15 years resident in Britain. TURIN describes himself as 'Early European". He speaks English with an East Coast American accent that suits his characteristic enthusiasm just as well as his sardonic asides. It's been said that he resembles GIANNI VERSACE. The fashion designer didn't have TURIN'S height, but perhaps they have a similar squared profile and friendly brown eyes. When Turin is really enjoying a smell, you notice that his eyes become round and unblinking with pleasure.
To me it smells like DIORESSENCE, which was a landmark," TURIN continues rapidly, "although strictly speaking it wasn't a landmark - but in any event, it has the chypre base from CUIR DE RUSSIE but also something of YVES SAINT LAURENT’S CHAMPAGNE..." He waves a pointed finger in the air.
As unlikely as it might seem to anybody who has read any of his gripping DUFT-NOTE columns in the NEUE ZURCHER ZEITUNG, TURIN insists that until a motorbike courier delivered this new CHANEL scent the previous week, he'd all but sickened of them.
\t"I always think I hate perfume and then the next day a fragrance arrives that makes me change my mind. That's what happened with this insanely great thing."
While the fragrance industry manipulates a widely held perception that scents are mysterious and somehow unknowable, TURIN is an arbiter nonpareil. To him, perfume is not an accessory to seduction but an art form, comparable to a painting or a symphony. On snatching a little of a scent's vapours with his nose, after just a few seconds TURIN can sketch out its genealogy, then render palpable its unseen loveliness, or horror, with metaphors that leave one in a synaesthetic daze. It is this facility that makes his opinions more interesting than those of a mere connoisseur.
\tFor instance, at one point, we are discussing the commonly held belief that fragrances behave variably on different skins. "I've always said that's bollocks and sales patter. But recently,” and suddenly he's as grave as if he were speaking from behind a lectern - "I've come to the realization that top notes, what you get in the first two minutes, are affected by skin type."
\tOh, the top notes. I always want to get them over and done with.
\t"I agree. On the other hand, there are different kinds of top notes. There are the fragrances where they've spent all their money on the top notes,"
\tCan you give an example?
\tAlmost every modern fragrance. They have 85 dollars for the formula and they spend 83-and-a-half on the first five minutes. So the beginning is like a fairground ride. And then it just dies. Then, there is the second kind, the classical top notes, which are like an opera curtain embroidered with a bucolic scene, and you can hear the set being moved about backstage. That's CHAMADE by GUERLAIN or any of the 1960s French classics. Then the curtain goes up and there's a beautifully lit interior with a window on a meadow. And that's top notes literally as a curtain in front of the structure of a fragrance."
Most people find it difficult to describe smells, I say.
\t"Well, I’m delighted to hear that" he says, flatly, "I hope it stays that way." He often uses musical metaphors. Do you have any musical talents? "None whatsoever, but I'm a terrific listener," says TURIN, who prefers a soundtrack of anything "lyrical or elegiac" while he works, reserving special praise for the contemporary composer HOWARD SKEMPTON. "But as WALTER PATER said, all art aspires to the condition of music, and I agree, enthusiastically."
His ability to portray the scent-smelling experience - its emotion, logarithmic nature and sophistication-with figurative expressions can make the technical descriptions of fragrance (woody ambers and so forth) nonsensical by comparison.
\t"Well, it's like somebody saying, ‘this symphony contains cellos'," says TURIN, "Don't they all? That's a technical description of a perfume. ‘Contains cellos and violins.’ Terrific. But what's the fucking tune?"
TURIN tells a story about visiting the nose FRANCOISE CARON at the offices of QUEST, one of the six largest fragrance houses that supply fashion labels and celebrity brands with their perfumes. She asks him to smell a new fragrance she is working on for ESCADA and he says that it reminds him of a silk that changes colour as it's tilted in the light. CARON gives TURIN a weird look and, from a drawer, produces the brief given to her, which reads: a silk in two tones.
\t"I have this way of connecting perfume to other things, and it makes it easier for people to understand. But it's not what you're saying; it's that you're saying it at all. I think a lot of people must have had strong feelings about perfume but hadn’t articulated them. So when they see somebody articulating them, it legitimizes them. It's a permission. I'm just opening a door."
).
- Otherwise seconded!
