|
|
NZZ Folio 08/08 - Thema: Was wäre wenn . . .  Inhaltsverzeichnis
Jasmin et Cigarette
By Luca Turin
Sitting at the bus stop one sunny, quiet morning three weeks ago, I noticed an elderly lady next to me, far too crisply dressed for the shabby neighborhood and smoking a cigarette held very close to the tips of her fingers , her hand arched beyond flat, as in fifties ads. She was wearing a houndstooth jacket and a sweet, powdery, grown-up perfume which could have been the old Dioressence. A breeze suddenly mixed the plume from her cigarette with the fragrance and made me realize how much I missed smoke in public places. Now it is gone, we can see that smoke was the speech of smell, exhaled with every word. It was the olfactory equivalent of a group conversation which you could chose to listen to or treat as noise. It said you were in company, and could speak (or wear perfume) frankly to someone next to you without being overheard. Walk into a pub these days and the clear air feels oddly silent. Any smell of food or fragrance stands naked and precise, like a medical photograph.
Filtering out detail softens the edges of things and focuses our mind on structure, on melody, on the essential. They pipe white noise into open-plan offices so that people do not feel exposed. Painters stand back and blink when looking at a work in progress. The tinkle of glasses in jazz clubs never got in the way of the music. But it was more than that. Some fragrances from that period seem to have been designed with smoke in mind to be mixed at the time of use, one half of some ambient gin and tonic. It was as if the composed smell needed an audience: perfume supplied the music, smoke the crowd noises. This mysterious love affair between speech and music is what sends a shiver down your spine when in a movie the soundtrack fades into a conversation.
It is perhaps no accident that some of the greatest perfumers alive are dedicated smokers. You can see them in the street in the fragrance district of midtown Manhattan, smelling strips in one hand, cigarette in the other, watching a crew dig up the road. I have always believed that smoke helped their art. To be sure, nobody is going to much miss emphysema and lung cancer, and the ritual post-coital cigarette must be on its way out (what replaces it?). But the surest sign of a new era comes from a young perfumer working for Etat Libre d’Orange, Antoine Maisondieu. He has composed a fragrance that addresses the problem: Jasmin et Cigarette.
Teilen
Für 94 Franken pro Jahr gibt es NZZ Folio auch im Abonnement. Näheres hier.
Urheberrecht gilt auch im Internet: Verlinken erlaubt, Kopieren verboten.
|
The new book by Luca Turin
Why do things smell the way they do? A small group ov devoted scientists has been trying to crack the code of smell for 70 years. Building on their work, Turin thinks he has succeeded. "The Secrent of Scent" is the breathtaking story of the quest to solve the mystery of scent.
Buy now
Who is Luca Turin?
The Emperor of Scent" by Chandler Burr tells the compelling story of Luca Turin's life and work and his fascinating theory of smell.
Buy the book
|
|