'Meet Luca Turin, a renegade scientist and perfume critic with an extraordinary sense of smell.' Newsday

Funny, irreverent and passionate, The Secret of Scent opens the lid on two worlds - the glamorous and highly lucrative realm of the perfume makers, and the equally rivalrous domain of smell science.

Smell is our forgotten sense. Long neglected by science in favour of more prestigious areas of research, it's also barely understood in general life. At the core of our sense of smell lies an enigma: why do things smell the way they do? How is smell written into the molecules? This book is the story of the quest to solve this puzzle.

Luca Turin has been described in The Economist as 'a man with a powerful nose and a bizarre obsession with perfume.' Starting with a tour of the great perfumes and their gifted makers, he shows how few people have an idea of what perfume is or how it is made, let alone how smell works and what part it plays in other pleasures like food. But not everyone has ignored this powerful sense. A small band of mavericks has been trying to crack the code of smell for seventy years. Building on their work, Turin thinks he has succeeded. And like all good mysteries, the solution was all the while hidden in plain sight - in this case, right under our noses.

The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell by Luca Turin, the man Newsday describes as 'a renegade scientist and perfume critic with an extraordinary sense of smell.'

About the Author
Luca Turin was born in 1953 and educated in France, Italy and the UK. He holds a Ph.D. in biophysics from the University of London and was for 10 years a tenured staff member of the French CNRS. He is the author of many scientific publications as well as a much-praised perfume guide. For seven years he was Lecturer in Biophysics at University College London. He now designs scent molecules for a US startup company, Flexitral, using the scientific process described in this book. He is the subject of an award-winning BBC Horizon documentary and a biography, The Emperor of Scent.

Reviews
"'The Secret of Scent may be a curiosity, but it is one that will have you smelling the silence of a snowy night.' Observer"



Book Information
ISBN 9780571215386
Author Luca Turin
Format Paperback
Page Count 224
Imprint Faber & Faber
Publisher Faber & Faber
Weight(grams) 185g
Dimensions(mm) 195mm * 127mm * 15mm