The Hindu Business Line : Our sense of smell never weakens

“When you breathe in the smell of a pine forest, or your mother’s skin, you are taking molecules right inside your body and that makes smell a very intimate sense,” writes Celia Lyttelton in The Scent Trail ( www.landmarkonthenet.com ). Sight and sound are physical senses, but smell and taste are chemical, she explains.

“From birth to death our eyesight and other senses deteriorate, but our sense of smell never weakens because the cells regenerate every twenty-four days.”

We don’t put our nose to its fullest use, though it can recognise some 5 lakh different odours. Brain may not register them all consciously, but “once you’ve smelt something for the first time the next time you encounter that particular smell you can immediately identify it.”

The author’s ‘olfactory odyssey’ begins at a bespoke perfumer in London, Anastasia Brozler, the founder of Creative Perfumers, to concoct a pyramid formula, for a personal scent. There are seven families of smells, viz. fougère (fern), floral, citrus, chypre, woody, leather and oriental; and a really good scent is a palimpsest and the layers are made up of what, in the trade, are called ‘notes’, guides Lyttelton.

“The top notes, of citrus, ‘float’; the middle notes are floral and longer lasting; the base notes are usually woody and the most enduring…Most perfumes contain anything from thirty to several hundred ingredients.” Composing a perfume is an abstract art, extols the author.

The artist’s intention is to transpose the memory of, say, “a garden in the rain, or something more abstract, like a piece of music, into a perfume,” and associate olfactory images with the visual ones. His idea, for instance, can be of “a forest at dawn soaked in dew and a pair of lovers whose sweat mingles with the dew on the forest floor….”

Well, catch up with the next stage of the author’s odyssey, involving a lot of legwork: to go to places where the ingredients of her personal formula are grown, meet the people who harvest them, and ‘discover at least some of the secrets of perfume-making from the perfumers who ‘magic’ the raw ingredients into scent.’

There is an India leg of the tour, when Lyttelton chases jasmine, ‘moonlight of the grove’ after being through France, Morocco, Turkey, Italy, and Sri Lanka. The Arabs call it yasmyn, and the plant became indigenous in Europe after the Moors brought it to the gardens of The Alhambra in Granada, one learns.

“A high-yielding clone of Spanish jasmine has recently been developed at Tamil Nadu Agricultural University in Coimbatore.” About 8,000 flowers are needed to make just 1 ml of jasmine absolute, or 1 tonne of flowers to make 1 litre of absolute, she describes. “It is, literally, like getting blood out of stone.”

Her narrative is graphic on the ‘nose’-landing in India: “The acrid smell of bidi smoke and betel nut juice, rancid curds, fatty ghee and rotting rubbish intermingle with sweet-scented jasmine and wafts of coriander, sharp-smelling tiny onions, pyramids of sweet-smelling tomatoes and the smoke from the ubiquitous incense stick.” All float and mingle in the heat and dust, but the potent Indian perfumes are often the strongest smells, Lyttelton finds.

Her quest for wild vetivert (Anatherum muricatum) goes via Delhi, Kanpur and Kannauj. “Vetivert is deceptively rich in oil: it is one of the most complex oils known to man. Scientists have isolated more than 150 molecules from it and there are still more mysteries to be unearthed from its roots…”

A book you may like to sniff through!

http://BookPeek.blogspot.com