Luca Turin on perfume etc.

The Saint Georges Hotel in 1950 I was born in Beirut. This turned out to have long-term effects, such as being described as a Lebanese-American scientist on Wikipedia (I am in fact Italian), and being grilled every time upon landing in Tel-Aviv, typically by a young woman in uniform, for possible terrorist intent. How it happened requires a little backgrโ€ฆ

Iโ€™m on record saying that the only honest products in mainstream perfumery, if one defines honesty as truthful labeling of whatโ€™s in the can, are dupes. This applies mostly to the US where labels are allowed to say โ€œOur Version of [โ€ฆ].โ€ In the more decorous EU, you have to know which thing is a dupe of what, but fortunately magazines and the internet will let you know. Zara perfumes are mostly dupes, and some of them are much-liked, so I paid the local Zara shop a visit.

Something is happening in perfumery. I finally understood this when I received a parcel from Maksim Bortnikov in Thailand. Ian Fleming famously wrote โ€œOnce is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.โ€ The three fragrances he sent me are an insurrection.

Every day brings new wonders, and this one belonged to the special category of things that are marginally useful, prodigiously clever1, totally novel and intensely nerdy: the Digital Sundial. I encountered it on LinkedIn, a website I am signed up to and detest (I call it HR porn). It is a version of the classical sundial where the gnomon is artfully hollowed out so that light passing through it casts a pattern of sunlit dots that gives the time in numbers.

Kyiv-Moscow sleeper cabin (Wikipedia) Many years ago, in late Soviet days, I took the sleeper train Kyiv-Moscow. I had been allocated a single cabin in first class, complete with lace doilies and curtains, two velvet couch seats facing each other, small table in the middle. My neighbor was a young Dutch woman on one of those friendship-between-the peoples trips the USSR spent money on in those days. She was an enthusiastic lass and had a wonderful time in Kiev.

One of the strongest pieces of empirical evidence in favor of the idea that our nose smells molecular vibrations is that boron hydrides (B-H compounds, aka boranes) smell sulfuraceous. This matters because the only two things in the universe that have vapor pressure and vibrate around 2500 cm-1 (wavenumber units) are SH and BH. They are also the only atom combinations that give a โ€œsulfurโ€ smell.

On a very hot evening in Athens some weeks ago, I met Tudor Ristea, creative director of Ataraxia perfumes. His Deity was a finalist in the Art and Olfaction Awards, and he asked me whether I wanted to smell it. I did, and disliked it not because of anything specific to the composition, but because it’s a honey perfume and I hate the genre. He seemed completely unfazed by my snap judgment, and asked whether I wanted instead to smell a perfume he hated, his Spinal Tap.

Fifty years ago I first heard of Lazar Berman, an extraordinary Russian pianist who had been confined to the Soviet Union and prevented from doing international concert tours. Aficionados knew about him from his Melodiya recordings alone. Berman had perfected a unique combination of massive strength and crisp delicacy that was perfect for Late Romantic pieces. Like all People’s Artists of the Russian Federation, he earned his living by touring the USSR and giving concerts in dozens of small venues.

I’ve just been through a very exciting few days. A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by OpenAI who had read a previous post of mine and asked whether I’d be interested in joining a group of academics and scientists who are trying to figure out what LLMs can do for them. I said yes, and by way of a very generous reward, was comped a six-month subscription to their most powerful model. My contact urged me to use an app called Codex, about which I knew nothing, and report back.

Few manufactured objects in Europe bear the stamp Made in Belgium, but the country made an outsize export contribution to European culture: comics (BD, bande dessinéepronouced bédé) such as Tintin, the Smurfs and many others like the immortal Gaston Lagaffe. Because they are in French (native language to half of Belgium), they are often assumed to be French. Until high school, most of what I knew about the world came from Tintin. One of my favorite comics used to be Michel Vaillant.