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The Scent Trail by Celia Lyttelton
By Rita Cook
“The Scent Trail” by Celia Lyttelton is the tale of how one woman's quest for the perfect perfume took her around the world. Lyttelton, an artist and writer, gives us an excellent peek into the world of fragrance like it has never been seen before. Vivid details are provided as well as where fragrance has its place in history and how it began.
Tidbits and little-known facts such as Casanova adding ambergris to chocolate mousse to aid his amorous adventures or Charles Dickens carrying a monogrammed pocket nutmeg grater in his waist coast at a time when nutmeg was used to ward off evil are included.
You'll say “I didn't know that,” but find it highly fascinating just as Lyttelton did as she set out on her fragrance-inspired course.
Scent has great power and nowhere is that more obvious than in this book, “The Scent Trail.” As scent and fragrance developed readers will see the parallel with the advancement of civilizations as well as the beginning of both science and medicine, the movement of faiths and the link between ancient, classical, medieval and modern worlds.
Think about it, scent is a strong invoker of memories. Everyone at some time in their life experiences a distant memory brought on by a sudden unexpected smell, no matter how faint. With scent we are given the chance to go back to our childhood, a forgotten vacation or to remember the presence of a long-lost family or friend.
Fragrance had always intrigued Lyttelton, and her long-time ambition was to have a scent created just for her. Because of this ambition she entered into the world of oils and essences. In the back of the book there is also a wonderful glossary of terms used by perfumers so readers will have a better understanding of what is being discussed.
Chapters include topics such as Mimosa, Neroli and Petitgrain, Damask Rose, Nutmeg, Zambac Jasmine and Vetivert and Ambergris. As well, the author notes in the introduction that according to Proust “each hour of our lives is stored away in a smell and in a taste, and when those smells or tastes are re-experienced memories are triggered.”
Indeed, the sense of smell, as Lyttelton notes, “has the power to suppress the rationale, critical left brain and to stimulate the creative, dreamy right brain, so it evokes memories with more emotional force than any other sense.”
Once you become drawn into this book “The Scent Trail” you, like Lyttelton will be pulled into the world of smells wanting to delve deeper into the origins of each scent, the history and culture of each ingredient as it was used in times past and as it is being used today. On your journey with the author enjoy Grasse, the perfume capital of the Riviera, Morocco full of captivating smells for the senses, the iris fields of Tuscany, the nutmeg plantations in Sri Lanka and even the Socotra, which is the home of the rarest and most mysterious scent in perfumery, ambergris. And more surprising, Ambergris is actually found in the belly of whales.
If you're an armchair traveler and love to travel the world with authors as they experience and discover new lands this book is for you. And, as Lyttelton notes, “I thought about my two years of traveling and the thousands of miles that I'd covered; now those miles were compressed into one little flacon. I thought of the vast distances the incense caravans used to travel across the sun-scorched deserts to convey precious and rare perfumes to pharaohs, priests, Chaldean princes, Roman senators and Chinese concubines. I thought about how the frankincense trail was 2,000 miles long and that the route ended in Petra, the rose red city half as old as time.”
More than anything in her journey however, she thinks about how she might finally have found her own scent.