The Hindu Business Line : The poetry of perfume

Does a woman's hair have natural fragrance? One would never know these days because of the heavy use of shampoos and hair oils, creams and conditioners. Such an exercise may be as difficult as trying to distinguish between the smell of a baby and that of Johnson's powder or Cerelac. But that issue about tresses finds a place in mythology and, as the story goes, the opinion of an independent expert was in the negative.

"Virtually all the smells in all scented products in the world are manufactured by six huge companies that operate in carefully guarded anonymity," writes Chandler Burr in The Emperor of Scent, published by Random House (www.atrandom.com) .

The `Big Boys' are: International Flavors & Fragrances (US), Givaudan Roure and Firmenich (Switzerland), Quest International (UK), Haarmann & Reimer (Germany), and Takasago (Japan). Their products are `molecules' that trigger the human sense of taste and smell. But aren't we talking about smell, so where does taste come from? "Ninety per cent of what we taste" is in fact given by smell, says Burr.

Taste is but a dwarfish sense "responding to only six different stimuli: sweet, sour, salt, bitter, umami (richness), and astringent". In contrast, smell responds to "ten thousand or so distinguishable molecular smells" and even that number is only a guess. In economic terms, this molecular business is worth $20 billion a year, the book informs, and auditors may be enticed to stop `hearing' and start `smelling'.

The big boys employ "hundreds of chemists, molecular jockeys who spend their days welding atoms together to create new molecules with new smells" and which one day wafts by you in the mall, shall we say, evoking "mythical springtimes in distant countries we've never known".

The perfume professionals translate visionary demands as abstract as "smell of old melting candles in ballrooms of Italian marble during a Chinese winter", "fragrance surrendered by a young blue flower crushed under the heated, ivory back of a woman with chocolate eyes", or "scent that lightning makes the instant it strikes a platinum rose." That is poetry of perfume, to be delivered in atoms.

Among senses, smell is an enigma. But since "an astounding 1 per cent of human genes are devoted to olfaction," you cannot ignore it. Burr's work has scientist Luca Turin, as the central character, and it is part story, and part science. Thus, for Turin, `cis-3-hexenol' is `cut grass'; benzonitrile is `shoe polish'; and something else is `scrambled egg, gasoline'. Remember that for a perfumer there is `no bad smell'. That explains why `all the great French perfumes' have a repulsive ingredient. Such as civet, "this hideous and ferocious powerful extract from the butthole of a Chinese tomcat".

Likewise "a six-membered ring with an oxygen and a sulfur" is what Oxane is — smelling like "hot sweat on a ripe mango" — with phenomenal power as "a green marijuana-like note". Some are unbelievable combinations. Cashmeran, for instance, has `no precise character': "A musty, wet-concrete note with camphor-like feel, and a fruity, blackberries note that pops in and out of focus." So, if you are not able to fathom your spouse, the culprit could be the perfume, so check out.

Chapter VI is `India', devoting more than 50 pages. It talks about the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) — "the Indian equivalent of Los Alamos and NIH combined", and a pilgrimage to Bombay Muslims ("among the most famous makers of perfume raw materials in the world").

Do you know that `oudh' wood costs around $50,000 per kilo? "It's the wood of a certain Indian tree that has been eaten by a fungus. You carve out the rotten wood that has taken on the smell of the fungus and extract the fragrance. There's only one supplier to the West. It's a drop-dead smell, very complex, honey, fresh tobacco, spices, amber, cream." Worth investing in, looks like.

A book to sniff out, if you're sufficiently nosy about perfumes.

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The poetry of perfume