Meaningful Scents around the World (2006) by Roman Kaiser: Perfume Book Review

Sometimes the readers have a pre-conceived notion about where a book is going—although I suppose Proustian reminiscence never involved headspace technology. 

~by guest writer AlbertCAN

I first deduced a book with a rose on the cover would stay comfortably within the confine of conventional beauty. Guess again with Roman Kaiser as I found out when first cracked open “Meaningful Scents around the World” (2006), a fragrant journey around the world to some of the exciting places the author has visited during his 30 years of olfactory research.

One of the first things Kaiser covers, defying all of my expectations, is China —2500 years ago.

How Kaiser managed to track down the orchids Confucius praised and identified Cymbidium georingii as the scholar’s favourite is still beyond me. I actually spent about three decades trying to decipher it—and no luck—but then Kaiser solved the riddle like nobody’s business the minute I opened the book, not only providing insightful details about the plants but actually describes the scents in ways even a fragrance amateur would be interested in purchasing if the headspace result could be available in bottles. (Good luck convincing fragrance account managers that fascination.) Then again, who knew the orchid scent Confucius once enjoyed resembles a very ripe lemon crossed with lily of the valley?

And then it gets more and more curious from there.

Ever wonder what makes fine wines smelling the way they are? Actually, how about a fine 1988 vintage from Château d'Yquem? Kaiser has a report on that. Now Francophiles might be slightly miffed that Kaiser did not analyze the cult 1961 Sauternes featured in a pivotal sequence of Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud (1995), considered many as one of director Claude Sautet’s masterpieces (and one of the finest performances by French cinematic icon Emmanuelle Béart), but having a glimpse of the famous wine is good enough for a non-drinker like me.

From wine Kaiser then goes off to interesting places. Gewürztraminer actually a rosy smell due to ionones, and then from ionones he managed to examine how the modern hybrid roses benefit from the introduction of Rosa chinesis into the European rose hybridization program, using beta ionone as the indicator as he backtracks the evolution of roses.

Somewhere in between those sections Kaiser visits the famous nymphs—Egyptian blue lotus, for instance. Now the sacred blue lotus (Nymphaea caerulea) is incredibly fascinating, actually a water lily yet not only having a gorgeous hyacinth-like scent (minus the earthy undertone associated with the Dutch hyacinth hybrids) but actually was also used as the ancient Egyptian party drug or a shamanistic aid. Considering the fact that the wines in various Egyptian religious ceremonies were often macerated in the sacred blue lotus first one can only imagine how far the ancient Egyptians went in order to contact the divine! Then there’s the Amazonian water lily Victoria amazonica, initially named after Queen Victoria as Victoria regia and now linked to the iconic Waterlily House at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew , England . Kaiser analyzed the Victorian marvel along with its sibling Victoria cruziana—though curiously enough the samples were taken from Munich’s Nymphenburg Palace—and concluded that two water lilies have, curiously enough, a plum-like scent in order to attract a specific species of beetles for pollination. Kaiser also notes that both species have similar scents, though amazonica is more refined than that of cruziana.

(Alas, I also secretly wished Kaiser would also explore the famous Sri Lankan lotus padparadscha, a flora so glowing that a Ceylon sapphire is named after. But then Kaiser did not make the detour!)

All in all what Kaiser really excels in this book, beyond all the aromatic magic and tour de force, is a sense of thematic coherence, never fails to communicate to the audience how the wide array of scents deserve their places in this book, which is so difficult to do considering to vast geographical, temporal, and cultural terrains he needs to whiz through in mere 304 pages. By keeping each theme to itself Kaiser surprisingly creates a focused, intimate way to maintain the excitement of each idea. This isn’t a chemistry text, more like an incredibly elevated edition of National Geography, only better.

But be warned: Kaiser did not reveal all the chemical readings, choosing to leave out, for instance, some of the more spectacular modern rose and incense findings. (Why devoting a whole chapter on agarwood when the headspace read outs are not going to be published in any shape or form in this book? And why praise the ever phenomenal “Fragrant Cloud” hybrid tea rose when the full read-out is not included? I have no idea why.) Kaiser also later transferred some material from this book for his “Scent of the Vanishing Flora” (2010)—some photographs and paragraphs are in fact near identical, although the floras are technically covered in different lights. Thus considering the hefty prices of these books, though really worth every penny given all the glossy pages and informative insights, one might be tempted to get just one of the two. (Which I chose to do eventually by purchasing “Vanishing Flora” and signing out “Meaning Scents” from my public library.) Of course, get both if you can.

Photo, from top: Book cover; Confucius’ orchid; Nelly and Mr. Arnaud from the eponymous movie; padparadscha lotus and padparadscha sapphires. All via Google.com unless specified otherwise.

R. Kaiser, Meaningful Scents around the World. Olfactory, Chemical, Biological and Cultural Considerations, Verlag Helvetica Chimica Acta, Zürich, and WILEY-VCH, Weinheim, 2006, ISBN 978-3-906390-37-6, 304 pages. 

The book is available on Amazon.

The winner of the draw...

...for the Lutens fragrance is benicio89 @ zum.de. Congratulations and I will need your shipping info so I can have this in the mail soon. Thanks everyone for the enthusiastic participation and till the next one! (soon)

The Seduction of Scent: The Myth of The Scented Panther & Iunx

The ancient Greeks knew how to sprinkle fantasy and poetry into their fragrant tales: The poplars wept amber tears for the fall of the sun; Tantalus is bereft of tantalising fruits of exquisite scent forever out of his reach; and upon every tale of hero or heroine transformed into some fragrant plant or material (like Daphne, Narcissus or Myrrha), trying to escape the ever amorous advances of some god or lesser deity, reigns the fascinating myth of the scented panther.

“The panther exudes an odour that is pleasing to all other animals, which is why it hunts by staying hidden and attracting them with its scent.”

According to the myth, of all the animals, the panther was the only one that smelled naturally good. This Greek myth teaches us a thing or two about the seduction of scent, if only in how it has captured the imagination of people for milennia. The classical writers write that the panther calls on its prey. Rather different than the hidden in ambush, squating its back down onto the long grass feline, keeping an eye on its prey unwatched. The mythical panther just exudes its scent and “the fawns, gazelles and wild goats are attracted 
to this fragrance by a sort of iunx.”

This elusive word, a strange transliteration that even inpired a fragrance house by the same name conceived by perfumer Olivia Giacobetti (Iunx), is actually derived from the Greek for "to call, to cry out" and it makes sense in the sense of it working like a calling card for the panther ~or anyone using a means to an end; for our purposes that would be scent. Latin transformed it to "iynx" from which "lynx" isn't too far away (and neither is "jinx" which is also derived from it, the calling of bad luck).
Panther on the other hand literally means "all beast", from the Greek παν (pan, i.e. all) and θηρίο (thereeo, i.e. beast). The panther is a symbol, a mythical creature with the looks of an αίλουρος/ailuros, a feline and a power multiplied tenfold, only belied by its suave movement.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

 ~from R.M.Rilke's The Panther(1902)

For the Greeks, the leopard, λεοπάρδαλη or πάρδαλη (pardalis), symbolizes the beautiful courtesan. But the latter is also designated by the same term, even as late as the 20th century; I well recall women referring to other women with a shady reputation in their erotic ethos describing them by this term (παρδαλή), which also denotes eccentricity and being sui generis in Greek! Βoth creatures make use of scented wiles therefore, of mysterious spells and the advantage of ambush, basing their power on things you can't really control. The smell of the cat has tcome to symbolise seduction, capitulation to an erotic pull, love conquest and the mystery of femininity. Let's not forget how the Greeks changed the Sphinx, a creature with a woman's head, a feline's body and a serpent's tail (her name coming from the Greek "to pull, to strangle"), from a solar deity in ancient Egypt to a lunar deity, thus tieing the feminity of the symbol with the regular tide that also rules a woman's cycle. (The Greeks viewed Bast as the lunar deity Artemis, who is also accompanied by ailuri, ie. big cats)

The "iunx", although a term transfigured by metaptosis in other languages, still stood for something tangible all the same; a love charm. In erotic magic, the seductress made use of a small wheel attached to a piece of string. This little instrument produced a whirring sound which caught the ear as much as the motion caught the eye: the pull was almost mysterious.
Iunx came to transpose the object on the subject who yielded it; it came to refer to the love potion maker, intextricably linking perfume with magic and eros. Indeed in classical iconography Eros is shown as holding an iunx. In the image off a red-painted vase by the Meidias painter (410 B.C.) Adonis and Himeros (the winged god of sexual desire) are playing with an iunx.


The god Dionysos, the god of transformative mirth, of wine and of abandon to sensuous desires, is often seen riding on a panther while his priests wore panthers' skins. Athenaeus in Deipnosophistae 2. 38e writes:

"From the condition produced by wine they liken Dionysos to a bull of panther, because they who have indulged too freely are prone to violence . . . There are some drinkers who become full of rage like a bull . . . Some, also, become like wild beasts in their desire to fight, whence the likeness to a panther."

Doesn't the panther also hide in itself the power of man-eater? The violent connotation of the dangers of getting too close to a vicious force of nature? Like love can be? In the 1942 film Cat People by Jacques Tourner, a Serbian immigrant fears that she will turn into the cat person of her homeland's fables if she is intimate with her American spouse.

Dionysos  was keen on transformation, often completing the task with a smattering of perfume. Witness Nonnus, Dionysiaca 14. 143 ff (trans. Rouse) (Greek epic C5th A.D.) :

"[The infant] Dionysos was hidden from every eye . . . a clever babe. He would mimic a newborn kid; hiding in the fold . . . Or he would show himself like a young girl in saffron robes and take on the feigned shape of a woman; to mislead the mind of spiteful Hera, he moulded his lips to speak in a girlish voice, tied a scented veil on his hair. He put on all a woman's manycoloured garments: fastened a maiden’s vest about his chest and the firm circle of his bosom, and fitted a purple girdle over his hips like a band of maidenhood."

Western European tradition reinforced the magical aspect of the panther in the medieval Bestialities: After feasting, the panther will sleep in a cave, its rest lasting 3 long days & nights. After this period ends, the panther roars, in the process emiting a sweet smelling odour. This odour draws in any creature who will smell it (the dragon being the only creature immune), upon which it feeds; and the cycle begins again.
It was the advent and domination of Christianity that finally turned the "man-eater" beast or seductive woman into the fragrantly sweet word of the redeemer: the magic allure of the scented panther who lies in the den for 3 days serves as parallelism with the stay of the Messiah in the grave for 3 days before his ressurection. The scent of sanctity henceforth became the alluring pull that draws men into a different kind of seduction: That of the spirit.

Painting of the Meidias vase via http://lib.haifa.ac.il, photo by Lydia Richter via gardenofeyecandy.com

thanks to Annick Le Guérer for her help

Improving our Sense of Smell: a Little Wiring

"A new study reveals for the first time that activating the brain's visual cortex with a small amount of electrical stimulation actually improves our sense of smell. The finding published in the Journal of Neuroscience by researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital -- The Neuro, McGill University and the Monell Chemical Senses Center, Philadelphia, revises our understanding of the complex biology of the senses in the brain."

From the full article Open your eyes and smell the roses: Activating the visual cortex improves our sense of smell

Annick Goutal Nuit Etoilee: new fragrance

When I was pairing Van Gogh's famous painting Nuit Etoilée with my review of Annick Goutal's idiosyncratic Eau du Fier the other day, I must have been in daydreamig mode. The mind does tend to work this way*. But it was possibly more than just subliminal.

I had received information that the next fragrance by the French brand (seeking wider distribution currently at the Middle East as per Brigitte Taitinger, after succesfully solving problems with the American distribution) is also called Nuit Etoilée, you see.

Nuit Étoilée is a new unisex scent offered by the Annick Goutal fragrance line; a fresh, aromatic spicy-woody scent in blue-tinged bottles for him and for her (the scent is abslutely the same in both declinations, much like with all the rest of the line). The perfume was inspired by the wildness of nature and the coolness of dusk.  This nightfall, this starry night began out of an image Camille had stored at the little laboratory the French brand has in Paris: "La nuit étoilée" de JF. Millet (1855) on a postcard that had been lurking under the papers for two or three years, hence the bluish tint of the flacon. Isabelle Doyen, the perfumer, believes this is how things work: You're inquisitive, you see things, you absorb them and then they come out in your work, almost by chance. Nuit Étoilée by parfums Annick Goutal is fresh with hints of sweetness as well as peppermint accents on the top while unfolding woodier aspects upon drying down.

The upcoming Nuit Étoilée by parfums Annick Goutal will launch in April 2012

*The name also immediately reminds me of Baccarat's one-time fragrance edition Une Nuit Étoilée au Bengal.