Why Smell is Evocative and the Destruction of Perfumes. My editor at Random House, Scott Moyers, and I cut many different scenes of different kinds (perfume anecdotes, accusations and battles, scientific info) from the manuscript for various reasons. We cut the following section of Turin's strong view on the "evocativeness" of scents, this overwhelming power of smell, for length. The first three paragraphs appear, in slightly different form, in the book; what comes after originally appeared in the chapter "Companies."

Walking very, very fast on a London street Turin commented, exasperated, "Dior is run by lower life forms. It is run by second rate accountants. These are people-" He gathered himself to deliver this, as if passing a microscopic gall stone. "-who use a thing called 'afffff-ter shave.' *First *rate *accountants would see that it was to their advantage to keep the quality up."

At lunch near Tottenham Court Road, he explained, "The financial temptation to dilute perfumes is almost irresistible. I mean, if you can make your *Oudh go twice as far... Instead of using ten kilos you use five, and given how much this stuff costs per gram, the temptation to futz is just irresistible. It's why Guerlain and Chanel and Jean Patou, those three, are so great. Not necessarily expensive perfumes. Just great ones that are never, ever diluted. No tricks, no cheating, no cutting corners." Sighs. "But today all bets are off. When the big fragrance firms take 'L'Air du Temps' and wreck it by having an accountant redraw the formula to take out the expensive ingredients and substitute cheap ones, what they are doing, among other things, is depriving thousands of people throughout the world of the thrill of the memories that are infused with 'L'Air du Temps' because unless it is the same smell, it won't trigger. The pale new reflection may be, intellectually, objectively, a reflection. It may carry sort of the same top notes, that musk in the base, and rationally you can identify the similarity- but your brain stem isn't electrified. Memory isn't triggered. People furiously call Nina Ricci customer service saying 'You've changed it!' and they get polite responses, 'Mais non, we haven't, we would never,' etc. Lies. 'L'Air du Temps' used to be much more intense, raunchy, strange. And they kept everything that it had in common with its contemporaries and removed everything that was different. There's a lot less benzylacelate. It's a very peculiar note, almost a wintergreen oil. So now it's just like a dozen other fragrances. The ingredients of the 'L'Air du Temps' that you can buy off the shelves today are cheaper, it smells more chemical."

He drums his fingers on something. "I have an ancient sample of the real stuff."

[cut from here] The self-destruction of the perfume industry is so painful to Turin because of his phenomenal sense of smell. Fine. But it generates something extremely strange here, something one notices suddenly, but only after a while. He might be in a conversation, and smell will come up (as it does), and some person will say innocently (as everyone does) that, oh, smell is so evocative! and I smell such-and-such, and instantly I'm transported to- And Turin will say, "Smell is not evocative."

Dead silence. The conversation detours in a different direction. They don't understand him.

The thing is, apparently Turin doesn't understand the rest of us either. It comes (you finally realize) from having such a super-fine sense. He denies smell's strongest power, that neck-snapping, unnerving ability to transport you instantly to a certain time or place or person, to evoke. And he denies it because, for him, it doesn't exist. "It's a wrong use of the word evocative," he'll say strongly.

He seems insane arguing it, but if you can glimpse his perception of smell, which is so wildly sophisticated as to be inaccessible to almost anyone else (it requires his weird neurological ability to perceive smells in terms of precise descriptive language, his encyclopedic knowledge of molecular ingredients, a course in comparative perfume economy, etc.), it makes sense. "I think," he will say adamantly, dismissing the idea with an impatient little moue, "that smell is not evocative at all."

What?

He nods. "The way most people use the word evocative, when it comes to perfume, is incorrect. To me, evocative is when there's a resemblance. A evokes B by a relation of resemblance or proximity. Vision has a distance measure-you're not too far off between aquamarine and sky blue, so one can evoke the other. Smell is set with zero distance measure- you're either exactly on the point or you're not. There's no distance relation between odors. They're not associative. Molecules like neocasparine evoke nothing for the simple reason that its black currant-and-napthalene smell is unique."

But this completely contradicts what almost everyone experiences with smell, right?

He makes a sharp, dismissive motion, reacting to this. "Put it this way. Suppose you grew up in your grandfather's garden, and he happened to grow a rose called Vera Lind. What you feel, as a small child, in that garden, holding your grandfather's hand, is only evoked by smelling, years later, in some distant city, a Vera Lind. A rose doesn't remind you of him unless it's the exact same variety. This is the case in perfumes."

Ah, but it is not the case with just about anyone else in the world except Luca Turin. He doesn't realize it, since it's so instinctive with him, so overwhelmingly powerful. To most of us (since our senses of smell are not calibrated to zero distance), sky blue evokes aquamarine and the scents of most varieties of rose evoke the scent of Vera Lind rose, and transport you to your grandfather's garden. Not to Turin.

True gourmands have this ability with their senses of taste: Detecting specific ingredients. And Turin's sense of sight is the same as yours. "A face is evocative," he'll say blithely. "If I see your brother's face, it evokes yours-my visual sense makes me think of you." But Turin's smell tolerances are set so high, the bio-engineering in his nose and brain so relentlessly precise, that his mechanism simply smells no connection. (Can he see the relation we see if he really wants to? Sure. But he has to think it; for the rest of us the evocations come unbidden simply from our less fine-tuned smell receptors.)