Turin: Fantastic Man, Part Two

The second part of three, continued from last Thursday.

TURIN is not a perfume snob. He doesn't prefer the rare and recherché. "Some people like hard-to-find. I don't. Seems it's like beer to me. I love the fact it's an industrial product." Although he dismisses male fragrance as "99 per cent crap--sad little hairy-chested GTI-type crap." he finds kind words for BLUE STRATOS, BRUT and LYNX. Even OLD SPICE. “Everybody loves to laugh about them but they're actually really, really good. They're totally unpretentious, solidly constructed perfumery compositions and the reason why they sold like hot cakes is that they work. BRUT is a classic fougere: soapy and clean. Would you rather wear this or bloody M7? I'd go for BRUT. It's good shit."
For six months in 2005, TURIN wrote a blog. Then it began to annoy him. "I quit on it because, although I loved writing it was eating my life. It was like bringing home a SAINT BERNARD puppy. Eventually it grows into a six-foot-high dog that drives you crazy. I found I was spending four hours a day checking what people said. And I have a Web addiction anyway."

What are you doing on it?

"Following a random train of thought. I don't think that is unproductive. I think my time spent on the web is some of the best time of my life."
A dark Monday afternoon a few days later, we meet again, this time at TURIN'S office, which is in fact a one-bedroom flat, exactly across the street from his home. "I have the shortest commute in Christendom," he says, and he'll admit he rarely goes out. Once you've paddled through the creeping tide of unopened mail on the floor, there's the matter of finding a chair. Ah, here's one, underneath a bath towel and a small electronic keyboard. The man himself is installed in one corner of what used to be a living room and now contains a long desk, covered in papers and bottles, and two sets of shelves. One holds lots of scientific textbooks. The other is crammed with half-used fragrance bottles. What the eyes perceive in TURIN'S den is nothing in comparison to what slides up the nostrils and, somehow, via the olfactory receptor cells (more on which later), flings itself headlong into the cortex. It smells great in here, LUCA. "Oh, really?" he says, stretching out his six-foot-two inch frame on a swivel chair parked in front of a giant desktop MAC. "I hadn't noticed."

TURIN is dressed in the same degage manner as before: pale blue pique polo, navy quilted PATAGONIA gilet, dark jeans, and sports sandals worn with socks. A controversial choice of footwear, if entirely suited to the stereotypical image of a research fellow at the Physics department of University College London (which is one of his titles), "There's nothing in principle uglier, I agree," he sighs. "I plead diminished responsibility. I have no particular commitment to style. Besides, these are not sandals, exactly. If they were the brown leather kind, worn with green socks, it would be more depressing.”

Possessed with a talent for interpreting perfume, you want to ask why TURIN himself has never turned his hand to fragrance creation. Never been tempted, is the response, but there's a quiver of ambivalence in his voice. "Well, in an abstract way I would love to do that. But I think people do well with what they are thinking about when they're not thinking about anything else. And I'm not thinking about perfume. I'm thinking about physics. Science."
In fact TURIN only spends one or two days a month professionally employed as a perfume critic. The remainder of the time he is LUCA TURIN, PhD., a biophysicist who designs odor molecules - the kind destined for use in smelly products from household cleaners to perfumes - for FLEXITRAL, of Chantilly, Virginia, USA. He clicks open a program on his MAC and the nuts-and-bolts formulation of a molecule appears on the screen. He clicks again and the knobby blue form, a synthetic musk, gently vibrates. "We're a virtual company. We don't need an office with begonias and a flag outside."

In the scientific research community he is best known for a contentious theory of smell he proposed in 1996, the result of a decade's research. While the exact way in which we smell - precisely how the olfactory receptors in the nose detect smelly molecules - is not perfectly understood, the prevailing theory is that our receptors distinguish each molecule according to its shape. The shape theory of smell, however, is unproved. Eleven years ago TURIN argued that the nose interprets smell molecules not by their shape but by their vibrations. The BBC recorded a documentary about his theory, and in 2002 it was detailed in a 500-page book called THE EMPEROR OF SCENT, by the writer CHANDLER BURR. Last year TURIN himself re-iterated it in a popular-science book, THF SECRET OF SCENT. However TURIN never managed to prove his hypothesis to the scientific establishment, although he says he is now designing odorant molecules for FLEXITRAL using exactly that theory. His audacity has sometimes had him labeled a 'rogue" scientist. But TURIN doesn't like to concede that he's been rebellious during his scientific career.
"I have followed my own path, simply because I believe that it's every scientist's duty to do so. I would never describe myself as a maverick. In the end, any self-respecting scientist wants recognition. One does not want to be on the outside."

Although he's technically Italian, TURIN has spent most of his life in France. He says he smells in French. He grew up in Paris, an only child. He could read at the age of four. A short period at school in Geneva is not remembered fondly. He was "not particularly" interested in smells as a kid but was fascinated by science, and on his return to Paris at the age of 11...spent all available moments in the Palais de la Decouverte.
By 1982 TURIN had completed his PhD in Physiology at University College London and was employed by the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, where he was to remain for a decade. 1982 was also the year he discovered fragrance. The first was SHISEIDO's NOMBRE NOIR. Now discontinued, he keeps a precious flacon of the scent in his collection. "This is the first fragrance that I smelled and thought: this is as beautiful as anything I have ever seen or heard. I mean, I had liked smells, I liked perfumes. But it was NOMBRE NOIR that broke through the ceiling and made me realize that there are some things you can say in fragrance that no other art can convey." He sprays a bit on our bare forearms.
And what does it say to you?

"Well, it's almost a person that I can see. You can fall in love with someone who's not there. It's such a personality," - and now TURIN'S voice turns a little tender, and he looks amazed, as if he's smelled the rosy scent for the first time - "although there's no person there. It's as though there's a hole in the air, shaped like this invisible person - that you are perfectly ready to dedicate the rest of your days to. There's a presence there, a kind of hologram, that goes far beyond something just smelling good."

Last part coming up soon.