Early the following year, during one of my periodic visits to the Galeries Lafayette, I noticed a shiny black arch in the corner of the perfume floor. This was the brand-new walk-in stand for a Japanese company I’d never heard of called Shiseido, and it showcased their first ‘western’ fragrance: Nombre Noir. I still remember the black-clad sales attendant spraying it from a black glass octagonal sampler on to my hand.
The fragrance itself was, and still is, a radical surprise. A perfume, like the timbre of a voice,can say something quite independent of the words actually spoken. What Nombre Noir said. Was ‘flower’. But the way it said it was an epiphany. The flower at the core of Nombre Noir was halfway between a rose and a violet, but without a trace of the sweetness of either, set instead vagainst an austere, almost saintly black-ground of cigar-box cedar notes. At the same time, it wasn’t dry, and seemed to be glistening with a liquid freshness that made its deep colours glow like a stained-glass window.
The voice of Nombre Noir was that of a child older than its years, at once fresh, husky, modulated and faintly capricious. There was a knowing naivety about it which made me think of Colette’s writing style in her Claudine books. It brought to mind a purple ink to write love letters with, and that wonder-ful Farouche, which can mean either shy or fierce or a bit of both. I immediately bought a very wxpensive half-ounce in a little square black bottle. It bore the initials SL for a mysterious name: ‘Serge Lutens’. A few months later my girlfriend took it with her when we parted, and soon after the fragrance was discontinued. Little did I know at the time that I would have to wait twenty years before smelling it again.
I had always liked perfumes, but this was love. I had just then got my first real job, and thanks to the election of Francois Mitterrand as President, France embarked on a brief but intense period of profligate hiring of civil servants. The 1982 vintage was to become legendary: never, before or since, has it been so easy to get lifetime tenure as a scientist. I had a proper job, I had time on my hands, access to an excellent library, and I did what scientists are supposed to do: start thinking. It was Nombre Noir that got me started on a long journey towards the secret of smell, a journey that would take fifteen years.
The secret is this: though we now know almost everything there is to know about molecules, we don’t know how our noses read them. Hundreds of times each week chemists somewhere on earth make a new molecule. In the days before safety officers, chemists used to routinely smell and taste the fruits of their efforts. They no longer do. My colleague Daniel Boerger thinks those who did died early and failed to propagate their genes, and the species homo chemicus var. gustans has disappeared. Still, if it is powerful enough, and they either open the vial deliberately or forget to close it, they will smell it. Every time it is an absolute mystery what each molecule is going to smell like. It is as if each new molecule were an inscribed clay tablet with a word written in an unknown script, and a smell to go with it, like banana or rose or musk. The pile of tablets is now enormous, so big in fact that no one can have smelled more than a small fraction of the total, and we still don’t understand how the things are written. The smell is encoded in the molecule using a cipher. This mysterious cipher is what this book is about. Like all good mysteries, it is hidden in plain sight. It has, if anything, deepened as our knowledge of smell has increased. like most enticing enigmas, it is simply stated: what is this chemical alphabet that our noses read so effortlessly from birth.